CUNY Academic Commons

My concern about moving this feature to inside of the group interface is that it's not really part of a group.

Maybe that's true from a technical standpoint, but the fact is that people get to the invite anyone interface from the group interface, so suddenly moving them out of that space is confusing. I'd say that if people get to the Invite Anyone interface from the group interface, the resulting action should either remain within the group interface itself OR result in the kind of modal overlay you suggest. That way, we don't wind up moving people out of the interface from which they started.

I agree that it's jarring to move to a different space, but my claim that "it's not part of a group" is more than just technical. By-email site invitations are conceptually independent from groups. You can invite someone to the site via email without inviting them to a group at all. Forcing this interface into groups would thus be a confusion, and it'd limit people who want to use it without reference to a group. I agree that an improved workflow is needed, but my point was that moving inside of a group will IMO create more conceptual problems than it solves

Is there a way to get to the Invite Anyone interface aside from the group admin menu options?

(answering my own question): yes, you can get to it from the Commons profile tab, which is currently pretty hidden.

I'd say that one should stay within the space one is, generally, so I'd go with a modal overlay at least for people who click "invite by email" from within the group interface.

Anchor added in https://github.com/castiron/cac/commit/bb1c30045c814bfe6f9efe2c2028e8a3c2f69cdf

Thanks, Boone. I'd strongly prefer to move it into 1.7 so that we don't lose track of it (which is my fear about the "future release"category -- unless you make regular sweeps through tickets in that category.

A number of bugs and inconsistencies have arisen around the group invitation workflow. I think it may be time to address it in a broader manner. Can we return to this discussion and see if we have any new ideas about how to implement? If we could come up with a general enough solution, this might be something we could fix in BuddyPress itself (where the workflow is just as lousy).