While there are other WordPress plugins that offer you the means to make a community site, our personal favorite is one that typically doesn’t get used but certainly should.
Mingle plugin allows you to create a site that is a great deal like any other community site that you might use. It is mindful of facebook in that it allows you to create a workable community of people who can interact with each other nearly on the full scale.
Mingle includes functions such as:
An activities page
A friend request page
A profile page that you can fill out with details about you and your life and your online activities.
It gives you a separate page on which to edit your profile.
Activities pages allow you to do updates such as the popular Facebook style status where you can update people about your day.
Members directory allows you to see if people that you know are part of the particular mingle community upon which you are active.
Private message and an interactive forum are also part of the things that you can use when you are adding your Mingle forum.
The real beauty of Mingle plugin for WordPress is that unlike most of the other community plugins which require a special theme that must be used, Mingle permits you to use nearly any theme that you like. It will be functional with all of the pages of your Mingle community.
Some of the many things that we’ve seen the Mingle plugin used to create include a food lovers site that let the users create their own recipe book on the site and share it with other Mingle community users.
A functional crafting pattern site where users could log in and trade patterns that they had created themselves for cross stitch or quilting.
Communities of Role players and a wide range of other online activities are springing up using the Mingle plugin. Thus far the plugin has proven to be quite secure when backed by a firewall plugin and a login lockdown style admin section.
