Adding this which I found which I think is the official info about Group Types:

https://codex.buddypress.org/developer/group-types/

And a Group can have more than one type.

I’m thinking that if a Group can have a Type then I’m sure it is not a big step for a Type to have a badge 🙂

Maybe another possibility is to use some feature of Brajesh’s plugin Blog Categories for Groups.

Brajesh will know all of the pros and cons about these points I’m certain.

Good luck.

Hi Hans and Brajesh,

I’m joining in because I spend a lot of time researching similar topics so I read yours with interest because it is connected with features that I need. However, I’ll try to limit my comments to things that might help you.

Fundamentally, you have many Groups, you are looking for a sort of taxonomy that can give them a common association and you would like to illustrate that connection with an image, or ‘badge’. You also want to be able to apply several different badges to a group, not just one badge.

In other places (actually from years ago) Brajesh and JJJ have discussed the ‘classification’ of Groups. Some people have sugested that Buddypress Groups aren’t very different to normal WordPress Tags in many ways, and I happen to agree (but I’m not holding myself up as an expert here, I’m just figuring my way through and brainstorming).

There is a plugin that lets you give ‘Types’ to Groups. It doesn’t look very well supported but I’m saying that without trying it out.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-create-group-type/

It might give some ideas to you.

In my research I found many attempts to apply Tags to Groups. There have been several plugins over the years and all of them seem tohave been abandoned, or I can’t find one.

Despite what I said above about Tags and BP Groups being almost synonymous in my opinion, I feel that if I could give a Group a WordPress Tag it would go a long way towards what I want. Because the WordPress Tag could be applied to a Group, Page, Post or many other type of content to ‘connect them’. For example, you could Tag one Group (or several Groups) and that Tag could have an associated image. The Tag could be a method to associate Posts and other content or it could simply be there in order to display an image (badge).

For the sake of discussion, let’s call it a “Label”, a sort of taxonomy, if you will. You can imagine this scenario:

Our imaginary taxonomy called ‘Label’ can be applied to anything. A sort of ‘agnostic taxonomy’. – Users, Posts, Groups, Pages, Member Types, Forums… perhaps even Tags!? What can you do with a label then? You can ‘connect’ many things such as giving a connection between a Group, Users, Member Type and Pages. Or, you could give a Label of ‘Tempo 30’ to any number of Groups. You might give the same Label to a Page that explains what ‘Tempo 30’ is, and by some programming if someone clicks on the ‘Tempo 30’ Label displayed on a Group, they would hyperlink to that ‘Tempo 30 Page’. The Page would be able to list all Groups that have the Label of Tempo 30 by using a search routine.

I’m just describing this to try to understand what you are looking for better and because it seems so similar to what I need. Please let me know if I have missed your point.

Bringing this back to Buddypress Groups, perhaps this alternative scenario would work for you:

If you use Brajesh’s Group Tabs plugin, your Group could have a default landing Tab made by you. On the Tab you could display an image and other content for your Group. An image, some text explanation. Or several images that have the appearance of badges. This would give you a way to display different badges on each Group. I’m sure Brajesh may have some ideas how you could do that. It could be time-consuming in editing all the Groups, I’m not sure at this point because I’m only beginning to investigate the possibilities of Group Tabs.

Going back to my ‘Agnostic Taxonomy’ I have been using the plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) for a few things. What occurs to me is that you should be able to give a Custom Field to a Group and it could be a Custom Field with several checkboxes (it’s a sort of multiple field) for example, thus:

– Tempo 30
– Carpool
– Bikes
– Something else

You would edit the group and check the relevant boxes that you created with ACF.

You could then program the badge (maybe with an associated hyperlink) to appear on the Group if the box is checked. The programming to do that is beyond my capabilities yet but this is the sort of route I am thinking about.

The extension of this possibility, for me, is that I would potentially be able to connect many things. I’ll use a version of your scenario as an extended example. Let’s say your Group has an ACF with Carpool. The ACF with Carpool has an image field and hyperlink field. You could have:

The image with hyperlink on a Group
The image with hyperlink on a User, to display on their profile or on a forum post or a page they authored.
The image with hyperlink on a Page that is about the Carpool topic
The hyperlink on any of these could take you to a page where you can describe the Carpool, list Groups that participate, list Members who participate, list related topics, forums, blog posts, link to websites, display pdF downloads about your Carpool, show a video and so on.

For me at least, this is the broad functionality I would like. I’m coming to WordPress from a different system where these connections are trivially easy to do so I’m struggling with topics similar to yours and I’m surprised that WordPress doesn’t already have these features available.

I talked a lot, thanks for listening and I hope it gives some ideas to you and Brajesh that might help you. I won’t divert your thread further but I will follow it with interest.

Best wishes,
Mike