Is WP the right tool for this job?

  • We have a client that prints a rather thick green book targeted towards the deathcare industry.

    They sell this book to funeral directors amongst others as a resource to get info on cemeteries, town clerk offices, newspaper obituary (obit) contact info and deadlines, etc to help plan a funeral.

    They want to build the following application to address a communication inefficiency in the marketplace… targeted to 2 parties. (they have already been researching this and I have been putting them off for some time and he keeps coming back)

    1. The newspaper editor: who can log in and publish info like: deadlines for obits, cost, phone, email.. data that the funeral directors need to file obituaries for families (BTW families get really ticked off if an obit doesn’t land in their local paper).

    This info apparently changes fast and the info exchange is painful.

    2. The Funeral Directors:
    They want to log in and search for newspapers in an area (maybe by zip code) to find the ones to submit to (maybe search by name of newspaper). They handle funeral services by distance often. Once they find the newspaper they need to submit the obit to, they want to find out what the deadlines, cost, contact info is and they want to be able to submit the obit through a form (+ pic?)… that gets emailed to the appropriate editor at the newspaper (who must confirm they received the email). Somehow a task gets created at this point for the editor and once the editor submits the obit for printing they confirm that they have done so on a certain date for that certain party (and an email gets fired off to the funeral director confirming this).

    Hope that makes sense… and the big question is can WordPress be a platform for this?

    Also, if there are plugins available that can either help with this project or be hacked to do the dirty work, please let me know. No sense in reinventing the wheel here.

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  • I’m not the most knowledgeable WordPress user in the universe and your post isn’t crystal clear (to me, anyway), but here’s my two cents:

    The specific application you’re looking to build is relatively unique so I wouldn’t expect help from any substantial plugins (at least not with WordPress). In fact, though I’m not intimately familiar with other platforms, I would suggest checking out Joomla and Drupal. You’ll be able to hack apart anything to make it work, but as far as I can tell WordPress and Movable Type are designed primarily for unidirectional content generation. That’s probably not a real phrase, but I mean that generally content is created by one class of users while another class reads and comments on that content. You’re looking to create a “web 2.0” application (I think), where content is generated from multiple sources, all of whom can interact with the content in specific ways. I suspect this can be done with WordPress, but it is not what WordPress does best.

    The generalizations that occur across the interweb about the main open source CMS platforms go basically like this: WordPress and Movable Type are blogging platforms, not “real” CMS powerhouses. They often compete for the same types of users (bloggers, as the stereotype goes). They hold your hand and are easy to use right out of the box. Joomla and Drupal are the “real” CMS platforms, but they’re too complicated to bother with if you want to do something simple (like blogging). Drupal is the Linux of CMS platforms and probably most suited to what I think you’re looking to do. It has a steep-ass learning curve, but once you’ve gotten the hang of it you can customize like nobody’s business. Joomla is a happy medium in that it’s easier to pick-up than Drupal while still being more powerful (in a CMS sense) than the “blogging” platforms.

    In the end, I think your best bet is to post your question on the forums at Joomla and Drupal. The people there will know more than the internet stereotypes have told me. You could probably do it with WordPress, but I think it would be easier on Joomla or Drupal.

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