Wordpress as the next Social Networking platform?

Question : Can Wordpress be used as the next social networking platform?

Answer: Yes.

OK, maybe you want a bit more detail and at least some proof of my exorbitant claims. That proof will be in the form of a brand new flCodr.com – a site designed to share and submit snippets of actionscript code.

Using nothing more than Wordpress, off the shelf plugins and a bit of theme hacking I will show you how to create your own social site using Wordpress.

About a year ago I released flCodr to the world. The idea was pretty simple; as a Flash developer I was always writing and re-using snippets of code. Quite often these snippets would be scribbled onto scraps of paper or into text files. Either way, I had no method of organising or easily retrieving the said snippets. As a solution I set up flCodr as a way to store, tag and access my library of snippets. This was a web based option and meant that at home or work I had access to my code. I even went a step further and made an extension that allowed the user to get the snippets directly from with Flash.

The idea and concept were great, however the platform that I built it on wasn’t. I had created the site in a few weekends and this started to show as more and more users began using the site. One main area of concern was with user registration – rather than creating my own, I hacked an off the shelf script to work (or not in this case).

I had a desire to improve flCodr and was about to re-write it using Code Igniter. As I began to plan the new structure out something hit me, and it hit me hard – why not use Wordpress as the core of my new flCodr site. Everything from the structure of the old site translated perfectly – each snippet could be a post which would have tags, be assigned to a category and contain other meta data.

User registration and log-in could also be handled by Wordpress and the huge array of plugins out there could easily provide the rest of the functionality.

I will be writing more posts in the coming weeks documenting the plugins and tools that I will use to create the site.