Can WordPress handle these functionalities?

Question

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!

Stack Overflowers and fellow WordPress fans...your insight would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance for your time.

Answer 1

This graph grants your experience with your weapon of choice, but the results are still clear. You can still tackle this as a 1 man show, it will just take a bit of a learning curve to conquer the fundamentals of a CMS more suited to the task at hand. I'm sure plenty of WordPress affecionados will come along and strangle my reputation, but I've worked with both and have found that in terms of flexibility, WordPress is not king, and for the custom coding you are going to have to do (hope you have some PHP?), I feel that you will find it easier to integrate with another platform. This task will be difficult if not impossible to accomplish without writing code, even if there is a set of plugins that appear on the face to match your needs perfectly.

But anyway, since you probably don't really care that much about my opinion, for WordPress, your plugin options look like..

Calendar - Events Calendar http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-calendar/

The screenshots don't look terribly promising though.

Most plugins I have found are geared toward being administered from the admin panel, it may be difficult to provide a user interface to such plugins, and it does not look like the event calendar is an exception. An experienced developer should be able to hook into the event publishing code with relative ease, but it could be a frustrating experience for the inexperienced.

For interactive maps, the Google Maps API is very feature rich, and you should be able to adapt it to your suit your mapping needs, regardless of platform.

If you want all of your providers to have their own blog, etc, what was once the WordPress MU plugin, but is now core-bundled WordPress MS (multisite) is what you need.

This again may also prove rigid, and you may encounter difficulty trying to bend the iron of WordPress enabling all your multisite users to be able to post to a common community site. I've only built 2 platforms with MU, so I'm not positive about this.

To unapologetically reiterate my first point, what would be light custom code may turn impossibly frustrating using WordPress.

I like WordPress, and choose it often for my clients. I have never extended it to suit a larger project.

If you do decide to use it, I look forward to hopefully helping you with any questions you may have along the way, feel free to ask.