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.
Making a client area in WordPress – Any good tutorials or plugins?
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:
You can use custom page templates with
is_user_logged_in, and custom logon forms, etcBut 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
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.
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.
Have a look at these plugins:
And maybe you can give a try to a RoloPress theme too.
Edit: I forgot about Genesis CRM for WordPress.
There is a free client area management plugin that you can use to create the client area and just customize it or add more on the features. See the plugin – https://wordpress.org/plugins/customer-area/
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