Ever wondered how cool it would be to have GMAIL kind of invitation system for your Plone site? PloneInvite allows you to add that functionality to your Plone site.

A webmaster would want to use invitation based registration for his site, if he wants to control who registers with the portal. An invite based registration system has a strong advantage when it comes to building online communities. The biggest advantage is, since only an existing member can send invites to the potential members, screening of the new members becomes and automatic process, this directly results in to an enriched online community.

How does PloneInvite work?

Once you install the product in your Plone portal(which like installing any other plone product.) it basically adds two actions to the site. One for the portal admin and another for the normal member.

Portal Admin's view: 

1. PloneInvite has invite quota for every member. Portal admin can only assign every member no of invitations, he can invite any one to join the website.
2. Portal admin can also set an expiry date on all these invitations. He can also choose to enforce the email address (i.e.. Register a user with the same email id as mentioned by the invitee.).
3. He can view status of the each and every invite he has allocated to the members.

A Member on the other hand can

1. invite potential members if (s)he has been assigned invites by the portal admin.
2. Member can choose to enforce the email address if portal admin has not already enforced it.
3. Member can send invite to any email address along with his own message. After sending an invitation member can see the status of his invitation.
4. An invitation has to be used within its validity period after that invited person will not be able use the same invitation to register with the site.