Using WordPress as Social Media Platform

I guess many of you know about the flexibility of WordPress. There are WordPress based Galleries, Shops and whole sites, but there is more. With a good understanding of the WP core, combined with a solid foundation of PHP & MySQL, you can create almost everything with WordPress.

A good example of that is WP Vote. WP Vote is a social media site: users add stories to the site and other users can vote for them. Once the article receives a number of votes, the article is published to the homepage and it becomes “popular”. When that happens, a lot more readers of the site get to enjoy the article and vote for it.

WP Vote was originally designed using the Pligg system. Pligg is a popular PHP & MySQL based solution to create a Digg-like site. However, the site was a very vulnerable for spam. The spammers were to active and for Pligg, there wasn’t a proper spam solution available.

That’s why Jean-Baptiste Jung, the guy behind WP Vote, CatsWhoCote, WPRecipes and a blogger at WP Hacks, decided to choose WordPress as its CMS. He wanted to create a WordPress site with the same features the Pligg system had, but with a better spam solution (WordPress has the powerful Akismet).

He managed to re-develop the site using WordPress and the outcome is great. Take a look at the new social media site for WordPress over at WP Vote!

As you can see, WordPress can be used for almost any kind of site because of it’s flexible core and a little bit of creativity.

I wish Jean-Baptiste the best with his WordPress based WP Vote!