Simon Goodchild has created a new plugin to feature recently active members in your community and allow others to easily contact them. It’s called HTS Display Members and it allows you to display the most recently logged in members along with how long ago they were last active on the site. You can add it directly within your posts or pages via a shortcode or place it within your theme files wrapped in a function tag.

You can easily configure the plugin’s display through its shortcode options. Check out a few examples below to see how easy it is to configure:

HTS Display Members Options:

Change the number of members shown (defaults to 5):
[hts-displaymembers count=10]

Change the displayed field (defaults to Display Name):
[hts-displaymembers count=10 display=user_nicename]

Change the size of the avatar (defaults to 50px):
[hts-displaymembers avatar_size=128]

You can also easily remove the email icon and email link and set the plugin to display debug information, all within the shortcode. See the plugin page for more examples.

Check out a live demo at: blueflipperdiving.co.uk. If you make the display section fairly large with big avatars, you can use this plugin to help your most active members get noticed. It’s kind of like advertising space, but members have to compete for it by logging in and being active on your site. You can easily create unique themes for the display of this plugin by adding a folder to your BuddyPress theme and tweaking the default CSS. Offering a large space where your users can get noticed will help to drive more repeat traffic to your site and keep your members active. This is a great general use plugin that you will probably see customized and added to many BuddyPress sites now that it’s available.

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Yes it was bound to happen. A new plugin is available that lets you enable Multisite in WordPress 3.0 without the process of digging into the code. Now creating your own multisite network is easier than ever! Check out the WordPress Multisite Enabler plugin and let us know how it works out for you. After activating the plugin, click “Enable Multi-Site” located in the “Settings” menu title in the administration panel. Fill in the required information and click “install”. You’ll need to login to WordPress again to see the changes. If this were added to the WordPress core, it would make the process much easier. For now you can download the plugin from the WordPress repository.

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