WordPress – Social Networking

I’m currently building a tiny social network for vector artists to post their artwork and get feedback. Anyways, I’ve been doing that for almost a year already and still can’t get it finished :) I’ve got design, I’ve got code concepts, but it’s all too complicated for a one-man-team. So this is where wordpress comes in…

I’ve tried the WordPress MU project (multi-user) but that’s slightly different. I mean yeah, people can run their own blogs and stuff but that’s not what I need. I’m looking for one blog with lots of users that can add posts (artwork or blogposts) and comment each other, oh and some rating system. So I searched the web for wordpress plugins that made it work like a CMS.

Role manager. This is quite good. Get your copy at SourceForge. This plugin lets you customize all user roles and capabilities. It’s well-documented so you shouldn’t have any problems.

That’s not enough. I want users to be able to post artwork, and it would be really nice if they didn’t have to use the standard wordpress admin panel, cause it’s ugly :))

Cforms II. Yeah, the plugin’s great. Works well with AJAX, has good styling options, but no. It was a pain in the ass getting Cforms II submit a new post as a draft from a specific user, but yeah, I managed to get it to work with some extra code in my-functions.php (Cforms feature). It worked fine until I tried to add thumbnails to posted arts, which made me move all my code to the page.php file of the wordpress system, where all the $_POST processing worked, and that’s wasn’t very nice.

Why should I use the Cforms plugin if I still have to hardcode my wordpress files? I’d be easier to draw a form and process it in an external php file. All the functions I’d need could be included from the wordpress includes directories (wp_create_thumbnail() and wp_insert_post() are basically all I need).

By the way, the wordpress codex has all these functions documented – WordPress Fuction Reference. So, I guess it’s okay to write some code, rather than install 50 plugins and expect to get it all working in 5 minutes :) will keep coding…