Most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling.
If you see your work as a job, you do it only for the money, you look at the clock frequently while dreaming about the weekend ahead, and you probably pursue hobbies, which satisfy your effectance needs more thoroughly than does your work.
If you see your work as a career, you have larger goals of advancement, promotion, and prestige.
If you see your work as a calling, however, you find your work intrinsically fulfilling you are not doing it to achieve something else. You see your work as contributing to the greater good or as playing a role in some larger enterprise the worth of which seems obvious to you. You have frequent experiences of flow during the work day, and you neither look forward to “quitting time” nor feel the desire to shout, “Thank God it’s Friday!” You would continue to work, perhaps even without pay, if you suddenly became very wealthy.
Welcome Pack 2.1 has just been released, which adds Start Page; when the new user logs into your site for the very first time, use Start Page to redirect them anywhere you’d like.
For those new to Welcome Pack, check out this intro video, updated for 2.1:
For those people using Welcome Pack, please be aware there is a new release of BuddyPress, version 1.2.4, out at the end of this week. The email feature of Welcome Pack might stop working until I get an update out, which I shall endeavour to do as soon as possible; might not be until after the first weekend.
Just a quick heads-up that I’m moving this blog to the latest version of WordPress and am changing the theme at the same time, so I apologise for any downtime or inconvenience you may find over the next few days.
I have had a few questions recently about what exactly will be in the next release of my Achievements plugin for BuddyPress, so thought I’d post the list here.
Allow site admins to create custom Achievements via front-end – this includes specifying name/description/points and avatar (via WordPress media gallery). And, of course, what site event to hook it into (i.e. to fire on new user registration, etc).
Achievements can also be granted to a specific user, to mimic a “badge” – i.e. “this month’s top contributor” or “competition winner.”
Groups Directory, like regular BuddyPress Members/Groups Directory. Lists each of the Achievements, and by going into each, you can see who has “unlocked” that Achievement.
A new area on a user’s profile page to show which Achievements they have unlocked.
Are there any features you’d like to see in sequential releases?
Due out this evening (23rd April), Welcome Pack 2.0.2 will contain a pair of fixes which will correct the filenames of the bundled localisation files, and fix a bug where the text in the email selection menu wasn’t showing the translated text.
Slava kindly contributed the above bug fixes and has sent in a Russian translation, which is cool; thanks very much.
Ray suggested that the username and group name lists should be sorted alphabetically rather than by user ID, which I agree with, so that will also be in the new version.
Welcome Pack 2.0.1 will be released today. It will fix a bug with the email dropdown box not working correctly on some upgrade installs, and will optimise memory usage for loading the configuration pages on sites with many thousands of users.
[update] It’s available now from your WP Admin Plugins page.
The other day, I released version 2.0 of my Welcome Pack plugin for BuddyPress. The big new feature is the ability to customise the text of the default emails that BuddyPress sends.
For those new to Welcome Pack, check out this intro video:
I haven’t had huge amounts of feedback yet, which probably means I didn’t break anything — always a good sign. There has been a report on the BuddyPress forums from someone running into difficulty with Welcome Pack on a site with over three thousand users; I’m waiting for some feedback from the person concerned and will probably do a minor patch to resolve it.
