Achievements – BuddyPress Plugin Review

• Editor Rating: 5 out of 5
• Download link: Achievements
• Plugin version: 2.0.1
• We tested with: WordPress 3.0.1, BuddyPress 1.2.6
• Author: Paul Gibbs
• Price: Free

Do you want your site to have the ability to give awards, badges, and points to your members? Maybe you want to highlight members who are the most active or perhaps the ones who have made contributions like created groups, posted on forums, etc.  This feature is now possible by installing a plugin called Achievements on your BuddyPress site.

Achievements Functionality

Achievements for BuddyPress is inspired by video game achievement systems. It aims to add the ability to reward site members with points, badges, and challenges on BuddyPress sites. One can create either an award or an event and choose the number of points to be awarded to members once these are achieved. This could potentially encourage more activity on your site as this adds milestones for members to achieve and be rewarded for.

Installation

Once Achievements has been installed and activated on your site, you can see a settings tab under the plugin name where you can enter keywords and descriptions of images in your media library so you can search for them easily. This is useful when you have a lot of images uploaded on your site’s media library.

Activating the plugin adds an “Achievements” tab on your homepage:

Clicking the tab brings you to the achievements library where you can see existing achievements or create new ones:

You can either create an award or an event. The plugin comes with pre-loaded events that you can choose from:

Once a member is able to earn an achievement, it appears on the achievements tab on their profile:

Achievements Review and Recommendation

This plugin really has the potential to increase activity on your BuddyPress site. This motivates users to earn achievements to get more points. This plugin opens up a lot of possibilities to reward user activity. You can display members with the highest number of points in a gallery of sorts, giving them more exposure. This could be very useful in sites like EasyOutsource, a job site that uses BuddyPress, where member exposure can translate to being hired more easily for jobs. Depending on the nature of your site, the Achievements plugin can prove to be very useful.

What I also like about this plugin is that it is very easy to use and set up. I especially like the fact that there are already pre-loaded events that you can choose from and this takes the guess work out of choosing events that you can award points to. Also, the ability to assign an image to an achievement is quite brilliant. You can create badges and these gets displayed on the members’ profiles.

Overall, Achievements for BuddyPress is an interesting plugin that could encourage user activity by making your site fun to use.

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Author Honey Young