I’ve been considering the steps to convert an existing Women’s business networking site from Joomla to Wordpress.

Joomla has wonderful capabilities, but it’s a beast to manage in the back-end, whereas building the same functionality in Wordpress will require some tweaking, but the administration of Wordpress is significantly easier.

This list is mostly for my own reference, but it might be helpful to someone else trying to do the same thing in the future, so here it is.

MEMBER PROFILE PAGES

In order to make this work, I need to make authors into members, and extend the fields they can enter and that will be viewable on their profile pages. I also need to add images to those profile pages, and make them searchable by business type for a business directory type section.

I found two plugins that might work for the extra fields:

• Extra User Fields
• WP User Manager

and a few choices of plugins to add images to the profile pages:

• Author Image
• User Photo

I’m not entirely sure that I can hack the

• Business Directory plugin

to initially link only to profile pages, but I’m sure there’s some code I can gain inspiration from here to get the job done. Otherwise, it’s off to RentACoder to get a hack worked out for a searchable directory like our Joomla site has.

MEMBER LOGINS

Since members will be logging in frequently, I want to put a login form in a sidebar to make it accessible wherever they might be.

• Sidebar Login

In case the members land up on the regular login screen, I want to beautify that with the logo and site colors too. I’ve always had success with

• BM Custom Login

so I’m going to stick with that.

Once the user is logged in, I don’t want them going to the dashboard. That’s just wrong. So hopefully

• WP Login Redirect

will work to point them to a page with the latest events, and member options that I create.

• Role Scoper

should help me restrict what users can do and see once they’re logged in.

I’ve dug up some tutorials to help me out should I get stuck along the way:

• Doing more with gravatars: Authors template page
• All Authors Template
• All authors/users listed
• Codex: Author Templates
• Wordpress Author Details
• How To Make A Wordpress Profile Page
• Extending User Profiles
• Codex: Author Meta

EVENT CALENDAR

The networking events, luncheons, breakfasts and trade shows are the heart of the business, so the event calendar has to work for this. Not only will people need to be able to browse a calendar view, but they need to be able to see all the events in a list, click for more detail, and pay for tickets to whichever events they choose.

This might be the biggest challenge, but I’m hoping that the

• Events Manager 2.0

plugin will at least give me a start. Maybe

• Event Registration

, which allows online registration with Paypal integration, will give me some ideas too.

CONTROLLING REGISTRATION

Another challenging aspect of the site will be the registration. Since registration includes many extra fields and a required payment, things might get a little tricky. Here are a few of the plugins I’ve found that might be useful:

• Force User Field Registration
• Confirm User Registration
• WP User Registration

SERVING ADS
Sponsors of the group get advertising across the site, so a rotating banner manager of some sort is required. I’ve used

• AdRotate

before, and I’m comfortable with it, so that’s probably what I’ll install.

OTHER FUNCTIONS

Since we’ll probably be adding a small shop, some member input areas, and definitely some photo galleries to the site, we’ll need

• WP-Ecommerce
• Slimbox Wordpress Plugin
• TDO Mini Forms
• WP Classifieds Plugin
• Another Classifieds Plugin