Elgg Plugin: Generate Groups

May 4, 2009 php

This post is more than 18 months old. Since technology changes too rapidly, this content may be out of date (but that's not always the case). Please remember to verify any technical or programming information with the current release.

The Elgg Generate Users Plugin made me wonder why there was no group functionality… So…

Enter the Elgg Group Generation Plugin

This plugin has the following functionality:

Creates Groups
Adds Group Images
Joins existing members to groups
Fills in some group descriptions

More about this after the file download: Elgg Generate Groups

Creates Groups

Since I didn’t see any easy way to create a massive amount of groups, this plugin does it. Specify how many groups to create and that’s all.

Adds Group Images

Normally, you can specify a group image or leave it blank. If you choose to have group images added to your automatically created groups, 2 out of 3 groups will have one of the random avatars as their group image.

Join Existing Members To Group

After a successful group creation, the plugin will join a random amount of unique members of that site to each group.

Fill in some group information

Other group information like short description and description are automatically filled in - along with group name. These are random bits of information. For any other hook that is associated with the group, there is an option to enable or disable it for the group generation - just like normal creation. There is another feature called mixed/random which chooses one of the previous two choices randomly for each group.