@olliecard – I’m sure there are many ways to accomplish this, however I am not sure that buddypress is easily adaptable to some of the requirements – privacy for certain things, restricting profiles and such. I hope someone can chime in an share methods for using BP in this way, I’d love to see those options.
You could play with things like s2member for some restrictions and payments even – but restricting BP stuff is a challenge I think. Using other member and restrictions plugins with regular wordpress is pretty solid.
I believe you may be able to achieve your goal using some other WP plugins – there are many others that get into profiles, membership, restrictions, classifieds and such.
It might be 50 hours of work to mash all the various components together in a perfect way – and if so you may want to look at what wpmudev has withe their “membership 2” plugin and others that mix with it. wpmudev peeps had quick answers and solutions for something similar I posted about there years ago. I think their prices are double what they should be – but the support there exists, and if you are looking at a serious project it may be best to get into a professional support system like that.
Of course you would mix and match some of the free plugins in the wp-repo and probably come out with something – press permit, profile plugins, s2member – custom fields, tweak some themes – maybe even go WP-MS multi site for some semi-separated static things – and you may achieve what you are describing as well.
I’d love to see others post about other options, and I’d love to see BP have more fine grained control over things – it’s moving in that direction with things like user levels and such so the future with bp is possible, I just don’t think it’s there yet, and likely won’t be playing well with others anytime soon – and getting code help with BP – even if you offer to pay for it – is not the easiest thing in the world.
2 cents from a random user – not an expert
Hi, great reply thanks for that.
The essential requirement is for carers and clients to create different types of profiles then find and contact each other. I’m surprised it’s proving to be so difficult!
I have actually done quite a bit of homework on all the membership and user profile plugins and have written to various developers for the ones which seem like a close match but none of them quite cover it. I have read almost all of the reviews on Chris Lema’s blog but none of the membership plugins quite do it.
wpmudev might be a great option, thanks for that I’ll check it out.
Am very happy to mix and match various plugins, it’s just knowing which ones to go for in the first place. And am more than happy to pay someone who knows what they are doing to help.
You could try looking through the WordPress Plugin Directory first to see if any of the functionality you need has already been made available. Once you’ve exhausted the free options, recalculate your development requirements and hopefully the developer effort needed will have reduced somewhat.
Hi Ollie,
this is all achievable with a custom build on top of BuddyPress and WordPress.
We’ve built similar marketplace type sites on the platform in the past. BP is a useful base for the profiles in this scenario, but also the messaging, and the activity items (which can help with audit trails and transaction history).
However, 50 hours is not a lot for a site build — a basic well designed & written portfolio site can take that in excess of that. Once you add custom functionality, the multiple screens, the security and transactional aspects of a marketplace site — you’ll be considerably more.
When looking to engage a developer bear in mind you will get a better quality site in less time from expert developers. Of course, you’ll also be paying higher hourly rates for their expertise. An expert should also advise you at the start whether what you want to achieve is reasonable within your budget.
Suggest you should post this on the job board along with contact details.
Roger
Hi Roger,
That’s some really good and useful advice, much appreciated. I take your point, to do something properly is going to take time.
When the business gains some momentum I certainly want to invest in having great looking and functioning profiles.
Where I am right now I am looking for the simplest way to test the concept as I’m not sure if our business model is going to work or not. So for the MVP we want carers to create profiles, and for clients to be able to look through and contact who they want to with some degree of registration (or control) from our side. Stuff like payment gateways, and even filters can come later.
I will take your advice and post on the job board and see what happens.
Please could you tell me which websites you have developed, I would be very interested to see what can be done.
Thanks,
Ollie
Hi Ollie,
if you provide contact details on your post, will be happy to send through some details on reference sites.
Cheers, Roger
@olliecard I would suggest after reading your requirements you could save yourself a good few headaches by considering using Ultimate Member over Buddypress. If I understand what you need correctly, it has a stronger base than BP in this scenario.
