As many of you know, I have been doing this freelancing thing for nearly 3 months now. I have really been enjoying it and as I ponder what my focus/specialty will be I keep coming back to BuddyPress. I really love the idea of using WordPress to build powerful interactive websites that empower people to collaborate and create a community.
While I would like to start bringing in some more BuddyPress clients, I also have a few product ideas that I am really excited about and one in particular that I would like your feedback on.
Basecamp for WordPress
I use Basecamp daily to manage my various projects and client interactions. It is a really great project management tool and has all of the functionality that I need without overly complicating the process. As I work more and more with BuddyPress, it seems like a theme built around BuddyPress could create a lot of the functionality of Basecamp and be a really compelling WordPress alternative.
I haven’t gotten too far into the details yet. Just throwing out the idea to see how much interest it generates.
Are you a user of Basecamp? What are the key features that you would want to see in a WordPress alternative?
Do you use different project management software or maybe none at all? What features would you like to see in a WordPress project management theme?
Thanks in advance for your feedback!
Tanner,
We’ve been talking about this over at WebDevStudios. We have actually set a client and his team up on a private BuddyPress install so he and his committees can manage their communications outside of the Basecamp project itself. It’s proving to be a really fun beta test of how you can leverage BuddyPress for project management. Yes – a theme for this would be awesome. BuddyPress needs quality themes built out. Trisha Salas and I have been talking about putting one together just for practice and to help me get more oriented with the program since we use it a LOT at WDS.
I’ll come back and leave better feedback later – just really excited to hear about this!
That sounds great, Sarah! Once I get underway we’ll have to compare notes.
This is something I’ve really considered, along with a whole system of gathering preliminary info from clients and making proposals. The whole workflow rolled in WordPress.
Yeah, I think there is definitely a lot of potential here. I’m hoping to start with a base system that additional functionality can be added to.
Sounds like a good idea Tanner. In general I love basecamp for its simplicity. I wish basecamp had sub-tasks that were enabled with the project team vs client permissions.
Interesting, so sub-tasks only available to the team?
FYI: The WP Project Manager plugin is actually a pretty blatant attempt to duplicate Basecamp features in WordPress. They even recreated the UIs.
Thanks Drew! I’ll check that out.
Tanner,
I love this idea, and I love BuddyPress. We are currently using a custom theme + plugins + multisite to manage projects, and it works quite well for us. That said, it’s a beast due to the Multisite architecture and the frankenstein conglomeration of plugins! 🙂 BuddyPress seems like a good starting point as well!
I have been thinking about open-sourcing my code and would love to hear your thoughts on that. Have you considered throwing your code up on Github or WordPress.org or something like that? If so, maybe we can collaborate.
Toby
Hey Toby! That sounds great, I’d love to look through your code. I actually have posted what I have so far to GitHub (it’s not much yet), but you are welcome to check it out! Things are kind of crazy for me right now, so there hasn’t been much activity but I hope to get back to it soon.
Not sure how far you’ve come with your Basecamp WP project, but I just spent several hours scouring the web for something like this and came up with a lot of different solutions. For what it’s worth, you can use or borrow from their progress, or others can simply check these alternatives out too.
In addition to what Drew mentioned “WP Project Manager”, you can check out a fork of this called Project Manger by TPC, projectpanorama.com, TaskFreak, Orbis, and now WP-Client has their own PM Extension now too.
Here’s a few helpful links:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/project-manager-by-tpc/
https://www.projectpanorama.com/
https://wp-client.com/wordpress-project-management-plugin-theme/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/taskfreak/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/orbis/
And here’s one more bonus that lets you actually put your BC feeds into WP.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/basecamp-feed/
Hey Segovia! I’ve shelved this project for the time being, but thanks for your contribution!