I’m a front-end designer/developer whose weapon of choice for the back-end is WordPress. Up to this point all of my projects involving WordPress were fairly basic and it has handled everything beautifully. I just landed a new client that wants some extra functionality built into his next project and I’m hoping some of you WordPress wizards can give me some good advice while I’m putting together the quote.
I’m trying to limit the need for any subcontracting for the back-end functionality, so my question is whether or not WordPress can handle the following (via plugins or light custom manipulation):
The idea behind the site is to be a community calendar based on location that Health Care providers can log in and post their events to, as well as participate in discussions, blogs and all the other WordPress goodness. The specific functionalities that I’m unsure of the best way to accomplish are:
-
Full featured calendar that members with access can add their own events to – must be searchable by date/type of event/location etc
-
Event generator module for members that integrates with calendar – includes upload field for images and forms for details event info
-
Interactive map to filter both of the above by location (I’m assuming this will need to be flash, but I’d rather find another solution if possible)
I know there are other solutions out there that may be more suited to this than WordPress (Drupal, custom build, etc) but if it’s at all possible to tackle this as a one man show then I’m going to charge it head-on!
Humble web folk and fellow WordPress fans…your insight would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance for your time.
I really like BuddyPress for interactive communities, so I tend to go overkill and use it for anything that might possibly evolve to need its functionality in the future. Combine it with an events plugin like Buddyvents or EventPress to create a much richer user experience than you’d have with just an events plugin alone.
The other upshoot of using BuddyPress is you can implement group-based forums really easily out of the box, which may ease other parts of your development process.