Yes – a member can have more than one rank and more than one badge.

Tell me – are these two groups of people in different SP User Groups? If so that would be the easiest way to achieve this as you can assign a badge to a User Group which is then automatically inherited by all it’s members. This would totally automate the process for you. (see Manage User Groups).

And a user can be in more than one user group as well although you do have to specify that as an option. (see Map Users to User Group)

If this is NOT the case then a certain amount of manual intervention is needed as you would need to define your two ‘Special Ranks’ and then use the ‘Add Members’ tool against each one to manually assign users to those ranks. (see Components > Forum Ranks).

Yes – a member can have more than one rank and more than one badge.

Fantastic!

Tell me – are these two groups of people in different SP User Groups?

I figure this is the easiest way to do it. I’ll make user groups as follows:

Donor tier 1; Donor tier 2; Donor tier 3; Senior Staff; Junior Staff

Joe Schmo is a tier 2 donor as well as a Junior Staff, so I would just add him to both user groups correct?

although you do have to specify that as an option. (see Map Users to User Group)

Which option would I select? I took a look at the mapping, and it doesn’t look like it will work for my needs, as the forum permissions groups are a bit more complex than the WordPress default ones. I would prefer to have it as above.

…you would need to define your two ‘Special Ranks’ and then use the ‘Add Members’…

I actually have 4 tiers of donors and 5 tiers of staff. Sounds like a lot but it’s a game server, some staff are techs some are moderators, etc.

So do I have a decent grasp on this stuff from reading my reply above? Once I get that set up how do I get the badges to display? I’m using the default theme. Thanks.

if you want to allow users to be in more than one user group then in the ‘mappings’ panel make sure that the option at the top – to limit to a single group – is not turned on.

The WP roles you see in that list are the default set of  roles that Wp ships with. If you need to add or change roles then you will need to add some sort of role manager plugin – this is all WP stuff and Sp just uses what is available.

But it sounds like you might be assigning people manually to user groups anyway so this would be your best way forward. The badges should just show up once they are being used.

A few more questions:

1. I added all the donors to their respective usergroups, but badges (which I’ve uploaded and assigned to each usergroup) are not showing up. Does this take a while to populate? If not what setting might I have missed?
2. Some of the users that I need to assign to groups are not in the list to allow me to add them, is this normal?
3. I can’t seem to add administrators to other groups
4. I assigned a few new staff today and their usergroup is set to be moderator true. In the forums they have access to moderator abilities but they both don’t show up in the moderator thingy in the footer and still show ‘user’ under their avatar.

think there is a couple of misunderstandings here…

first, admins cannot belong to usergroups… usergroups get limited permissions based on your settings – admins get full permission for everything… so thus they cannot belong to a usergroup…  If you want to give admins a badge, use the special rank feature to assign them a rank and badge…  that is what you see for Andy and I here…  its on forum – components – forum ranks…

second, your moderator adding is a known issue addressed here several times (broke in 5.1.1)… It will be fixed in the next version of SP 5.1.2 due to be released in the next week or two… in the meantime, go into your database and the sfmembers table… for each user you want to be a moderator, set the moderator column to 1…

third, if you want to display badges for users, you will need to add the template function for them into your sp theme… by default, our themes display the forum rank badges and not the usergroup badges… so edit your spTopicView.php template tag and find the display of the forum rank badges… will be:

sp_PostIndexUserRank()

and replace it with:

sp_PostIndexUserMemberships()

and if you are going to display forum special ranks (they are different than forum ranks) be sure to leave that forum special rank template function in the theme…

as always, we highly encourage you to make your own theme and not edit ours to keep from losing changes on updates…  see: http://codex.simple-press.com/codex/themes/theme-basics/creating-a-theme/

Thanks for clearing all that up. I made my own theme and did all you said, one last thing, how do I remove the text ‘member’ and ‘admin’ etc so just the badges show up and not the text?

I tried figuring this out on my own because I didn’t want to bother you again but where is the argument list? I’m not an advanced developer. Thanks.

its the options you are passing to the template function…  so would be like

sp_PostIndexUserMemberships(‘showTitle=0’);

I dont know what, if any, other arguments you are passing…  if you just changed the name from the forum ranks,  you might have something like

sp_PostIndexUserMemberships(‘tagClass=spPostUserMembership spCenter&showTitle=0’);

but its up to you what arguments (ie options) you are passing…