Different Uses of WordPress (as Social Network Site & Contact Manager) - part4
- Part 1 - WordPress as Job Board and e-Commerce Site
- Part 2 - WordPress as Review Site and Portal
- Part 3 - WordPress as Discussion Forum and Membership Site
- Part 4 - WordPress as Social Network Site & Contact Manager (you are here)
- Part 5 - WordPress as Newsletter Mailing Script and FAQ Management System
Today, in Part-4 of our series of “Different Uses of WordPress”, we will be looking on how you can use WordPress as a Social Network Site and a Contact Manager.
WordPress as Social Network Site

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BuddyPress will transform your WordPress MU into a social network platform. It is a set of plugins that has one core plugin (which acts as the main platform for all the other plugins) and a collection of other individual plugins that add distinct features to BuddyPress (e.g private messaging, activity streams etc).
Each BuddyPress component is independent. This means you can pick and choose which features you’d like. In that sense, it works more like a Joomla, deactivating one plugin won’t cause any errors with the rest.
It has lots of other features, see full features here.
Price: Free
URL: buddypress.org
Demo URL: testbp.org
WordPress as Contact Manager

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WP Contact Manager as the name suggests, is a WP Theme that turns your WordPress into a contact manager. Adding contacts will be through admin interface just like you create a “new post”.
Price: Free
URL: artisanthemes.com/themes/wp-contact-manager/
Demo URL: people.thedesigncanopy.com/
P.S There is another wordpress based contact manager called WP-CRM. It’s a free theme plus plugins that turn WP into a contact manager.




By shawal on Dec 22, 2008
Wordpress a full of useful things.
You can do much with wordpress and the best thing about it is its FREE!!!
Thanks Ades for sharing this….
By baloot on Dec 22, 2008
ades,
thanks for introduce this plugin to me. this is what i’m looking for to make social website for my local community (kota bharu).
the greatest about this plugin is, it’s FREE….
By Ed Kohler on Dec 22, 2008
Wordpress is a powerful CMS, but dang, that’s taking things pretty far away from what I’d consider to be the core functionality. If it gets the job done, great, but wow.
By Aglof Cartson on Dec 22, 2008
I’m not sure I get the WP Contact Manager. Will this make all the information available to all the visitors to the site or do you keep it as private pages that you need to login to see?
By Angelina Maben on Dec 22, 2008
Wordpress is very easy to use and optimize also.
By Ades on Dec 23, 2008
@aglof, you can make it private or public, it’s up to you. there is a plugin for making the contact manager members only.
By Agolf Cartson on Dec 23, 2008
Ades, aren’t there some rules against displaying personal information that would require you to keep it private? Or does that just apply for companies?
By Ades on Dec 23, 2008
You can’t just display people’s personal (contact) information without their consent.
But, I am sure many people who use WP as a contact manager would use it on intranet for company (internal) purposes. So, there shouldn’t be any problem.
By Rice Blogger on Dec 23, 2008
great find…did not know wordpress have so much different ussage….
By titan on Dec 28, 2008
this is interesting.
By Insurance Guy on Jan 6, 2009
Wordpress is great for many projects. I used to use Joomla in the beginning but found more functionality with Wordpress. It’s also good from an seo standpoint when it comes to se friendly urls and avoiding duplicate meta data across pages.
By calabria property on Mar 6, 2009
Making money online still requires a lot of effort and plenty of hours.
Never believe that you can make money without seriously hard work.
By english on Oct 21, 2009
Can we use buddypress with the standard wordpress or is it only for WordPress MU?
By GDI Blog on Oct 28, 2009
i got some errors whlie trying to install buddypress last version one month ago. would be great for me if i could find this post 1 month ago…
By Ruben | OurBlogLog on Jan 6, 2010
I cant set it up , can anybody recommend a tutorial for installing buddypress
By aki on Apr 14, 2010
every day computer technology is getting better and better and yet this is one great example of a great technology , if i would go 5 years back from now i would not even know what this is all about but thanks for posting this great information .