Making a client area in WordPress - Any good tutorials or plugins?

Question

I'd like to make a client area in WordPress from my freelance design business. I'm capable of making it myself but I was wondering if there are any good tutorials and plugins that other people are already using. A Basecamp style project management system would be the ideal.

Answer 1

Have a look at these plugins:

• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/projectmanager/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-crm/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/collabpress/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-invoice/

And maybe you can give a try to a RoloPress theme too.

Edit: I forgot about Genesis CRM for WordPress.

Answer 2

http://blairwilliams.com/mingle-wordpress-plugin/ It's a plugin that turns wordpress into a social network. It has a front end user managing system: Activity, Profile, Settings, Friends, Friend Requests, Inbox, Directory, Logout. Maybe you can turn this into a simple client area.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

I looked into this a while back, the only half decent one I found was http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ndizi-project-management/. In the end I just went with something not related to WordPress. Doing it in WordPress would be pretty much the same as building a custom PHP app and there were better solutions out there.

Answer 4

If you're building WordPress websites for your clients you could use have a Video Tutorials section.

If you don't mind paying, the WPMU Dev guys have one here, which has about 40 video tutorials showing people how to they can add/edit a post, stuff like that, embedded right within the admin area (or can also be embedded elsewhere on a post or page if you prefer) that way you could save your clients asking you a thousand obvious WP questions!

They host the videos too so you don't have to worry about that.

http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/unbranded-video-tutorials

I'll try and think of some more too

Cheers

Nick

Answer 5

First, for invoicing/billing use the WP Invoice plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-invoice/

The "members" plugin may also be useful: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/members/

For a custom redirect, to send them to custom pages rather than just the admin panel use: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/peters-login-redirect/

If you had them register, greet them with a custom welcome message on the page they log-in to using this code, which should grab their name from their profile:

Welcome <?php echo $user_identity; ?>

Answer 6

You can use custom page templates with is_user_logged_in, and custom logon forms, etc

But to build Basecamp it took years, if you could build that for your personal site, you'd b better off ditching your business and marketing the basecamp clone

Depending on what you want, the buddypress plugin may be of help