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Membership plugin for Business networking site?

Hi,

I need a little help deciding what plugins to use. I am creating a site for a local business network group.

This is a private group that wants to have a page for each member where they can display a personal photo and bio along with a company logo and description, website, blog and social media links and rss feeds. I also want to display blog posts authored by that member on the site on their page.

I need a member directory that can be displayed & searched by member name or industry type, keywords?

I have been really driving myself crazy. At first I did a multi site install but really this is way too much for this group. I pulled that I put in a fresh WP install. I have been playing with a few different membership directories but I am not thrilled with any of them and finally I was considering creating my own custom posts type for this. But there would be a learning cure involved in that for me.

Any ideas of an easy way to do this? I am gifting this to this group that I belong to.

I thought the “membership” plugin might be the ticket.

Thank you for your help!

http://longbeachbusinessreferrals.com/

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:54:28
  • Arun Basil Lal
    • New Recruit

    Hiya,

    So let me list out your requirements and my thoughts:

    – site for a local business network group.

    Multiple members, multiple authors, wpmu sounds like a good idea. Even a normal WordPress install could do.

    – private group

    Access by login only. Since it’s a free site, Membership is not the plugin we are looking for. Membership is useful when you want to limit parts of the site (like some pages, or posts) to certain members and access them on a paying basis.

    I would recommend the members only plugin, only logged in members can access the site, total privacy, and its dead simple: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/members-only/

    a page for each member where they can display a personal photo and bio along with a company logo and description, website, blog and social media links and rss feeds. I also want to display blog posts authored by that member on the site on their page.

    If you are going for a wpmu approach, each members could have a sub-site and the members profile can be the about page. The list of posts can be the archives using some archive plugin.

    IF you are going the WordPress Single Install approach, an authors page is what we are looking at. You will need some custom work, but its easy, so many tutorials around.

    http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-create-a-wordpress-authors-page-template/

    or some plugins for the same purpose:

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-about-author/screenshots/

    I need a member directory that can be displayed & searched by member name or industry type, keywords?

    If you are on Multisite then we have the perfect solution for you: https://wpmudev.com/project/members-directory

    with Members Directory, you can list all members and search through them.

    If you are on a WordPress Single Install using a custom post type is an idea. Have you checked out the CustomPress plugin of ours? https://wpmudev.com/project/custompress

    CustomPress makes everything easy :slight_smile:

    If this is a gift and you do not want to spend a ton of time around it, I then I think you shouldn’t go for wpmu approach, like you said, using Multisite makes the whole thing so huge :slight_smile:

    Hope I could get you started, I know you have more questions, Let me know!

    Good luck with the project :slight_smile:

  • aecnu
    • WP Unicorn

    Greetings femmesport4,

    Just checking if this issue was eventually resolved in another thread? Or by yourself separately to us? Or by us over email with you? Or using our live support?

    If so, no need to reply, that’s great news.

    If not, or you have any more questions related to this thread, please feel free to post them below including any new symptoms or errors and tick the ‘Mark as Not Resolved (re-open)’ box below the post area (or else we’ll miss it!)

    Otherwise, happy days, glad you got it sorted :slight_smile:

    Thank you for being a WPMU Dev member!

    Cheers, Joe