BuddyNext - community engine for WordPress

Inviting People to Your Community

Free & Pro

An invitation is a personal link that lets someone join your community with their email address already filled in. You send it, they click it, choose a password, and they are in. Invitations work in any registration mode, and they are the required way in when you run the community as invite-only.

The Invites manager under Members, where owners send, resend, revoke, and track invitations

When to use invitations

  • You run an invite-only community. In Invite Only registration mode, a valid invitation is required to sign up - invitations are the front door (see Registration for the mode setting).
  • You want a smoother welcome, even with open sign-up. In Open mode anyone can register, but an invitation link still saves the new member a step by pre-filling their email, and it can drop them straight into the space you invited them to.
  • You are seeding a new community. Bulk-invite a list of people you already know - a mailing list, a set of clients, last year's cohort - in one upload.

Where to find it

Everything lives under BuddyNext > Members > Invites. There is also a shortcut button on the Registration & Login settings tab that jumps you straight here.

Sending invitations is an owner action - it needs the WordPress manage options capability, so administrators send them, not members.

Sending a single invitation

  1. Go to BuddyNext > Members > Invites.
  2. Enter the person's email address (and optionally a first name, which personalises the email).
  3. Optionally choose a space to invite them into - they will be added to it the moment they finish signing up.
  4. Send. BuddyNext emails them a personal link.

Inviting many people at once (CSV)

For a list, upload a CSV instead of typing each address:

  1. On the Invites tab, choose the CSV upload.
  2. Give it a file where each line is email or email,first_name.
  3. Upload. BuddyNext sends an invitation to each valid address.

A few rules keep a bulk send sane:

  • Up to 500 rows are processed per upload; anything beyond that is ignored.
  • An address that already has a pending invite is skipped, so re-uploading a slightly longer list never double-invites the people already on it.
  • The file type is checked from the file's own bytes, so only a real CSV is accepted.

What the recipient sees

  • They get an email with a personal invitation link. If you gave a first name and a space, the email is addressed to them and names the space.
  • The link opens the sign-up form with their email already filled in - they only choose a password.
  • The link is tied to that email address. It cannot be forwarded and reused to register a different address.
  • Invitations expire after 7 days by default. An expired link is refused, but you can resend to issue a fresh one.

Tracking and managing invitations

The Invites tab lists every invitation with when it was sent and its status:

Status Meaning
Pending Sent, not yet accepted.
Accepted The person signed up using the invitation.
Expired The 7-day link lapsed before it was used. Resend to issue a fresh one.
Bounced The invitation email could not be delivered.

The tab also has a status filter (Pending, Expired, Accepted, Bounced, All) so you can jump straight to, say, everyone who has not accepted yet.

For any invitation you can:

  • Resend - regenerates the link (resetting the 7-day clock) and emails it again. Useful for a bounced address that has since been corrected, or a link that expired before the person got to it.
  • Revoke - cancels a pending invitation so its link no longer works.

The emails invitations send

Invitations use BuddyNext's own email templates, which you can edit under Notifications > Templates:

  • The bulk invite email is what a CSV-invited member receives.
  • Inviting someone into a space uses the space-invitation template, which names the inviter and the space.

Editing a template changes the wording for every future send - see the Email System page.

Good to know

  • Invitations are not the same as approvals. Invite Only mode requires an invitation to sign up; Admin Approval mode lets anyone request an account and holds it for your review. They are separate registration modes - see Registration.
  • A space invitation is a shortcut, not a permission change. Inviting someone into a space just auto-joins them on sign-up; the space's own privacy still applies to everyone else.
  • Invitations work alongside social login. An invited person can still finish sign-up with Google or another provider rather than setting a password, as long as the provider account uses the invited email address.

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