WordPress plugin page tells everyone that it has 34,514 plugins available. It seems that what ever one’s needs are, there will be a plugin available for that purpose. Unfortunately this is not the case every time. Sometimes developers have to build a custom plugin matching Client’s need. That is what vteam #305 did for one of its old clients who was looking for a community plugin for his existing WordPress website.
We have our own custom plugin “WP TTP Profile” and it is used to conduct online based test on “210 Project” book (a book to read and a series of powerful online activities that bring clarity and understanding to one’s life purpose). Now client wanted to integrate social networking features in his website along with this already developed plugin. We have two options available to fulfill client’s requirement:
1- We might choose a third party plugin “BuddyPress” that is WordPress no.1 social networking plugin and customize it accordingly but this was not a good solution because of interdependency issues. The other problem is that after code analysis, we found that it was not designed for the purpose of further extended development. If we had used it then it might consume much time rather than expected and also could cause loosing quality perspective.
2- We had to develop our own custom solution inside our existing plugin “WP TTP Profile“. In this way, we could fulfill client’s requirement related to social networking in a better way instead of wasting our efforts to change the code of third party plugin.
We chose the second option and developed “Community” section as social networking part of this plugin. Following were the list of social features that were added:
- Activity
- Invitations
- Notifications
- Friends
- Search Friends
- Groups
- Add/Edit/Copy Group
- Invite Groups
- Group Comments
- Events
- Add/Edit/Copy Event
- Invite Friends to Event
- My Profile
- My Privacy
- Internal Messaging System
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