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How to build a Intranet/Extranet with WordPress

by bernt & torsten

WordPress has come a long way since the beginning of just being a blog platform, with the community of theme and plugin developers, you can now do anything with the WordPress platform, you can create e-commerce, Intranet/Extranet, community and eLearning sites.

I’m all about minimalism, in selecting IT solutions/services for the small/medium size companies, non-profits that need a digital space. Would it not be cool to run your CMS, Intranet/Extranet, E-Learning on the same platform, it will save you money, time, resources to use a common solution across your organization.

Why Use WordPress?

A lot of times having a CMS, intranet or E-Learning website is about having easy access documentation, announcements, blogs, external information and training materials.

Which can be easily accomplished with a WordPress multi-site installation. WordPress can even match some of the more advanced features of fully-fledged intranet and extranet services/platforms.

Such as:

• Providing a company directory
• A company calendar
• collaboration tools
• Private social networking
• Downloadable company documents
• Project management
• and more

The advantage of a WordPress installation, it will save you cost, you basically just need to pay for your startup costs–which include hosting, theme, and plugins. With dedicate intranet services/platforms, you are likely to pay per user, per month fee and it can easily add up.

How do you get started, first you would need to find a hosting provider or if you have an internal server, then you will install WordPress, which is just 5 minutes of work?

You need to set up your WordPress for Multisite

WordPress multisite allows you to create an unlimited number of WordPress sites under just one install of WordPress.What that means is that you can have your corporate website, your intranet, your extranet and your E-Learning on one install of WordPress. It even gives you the freedom to add other micro-sites depending on your business model.

WordPress multisite is a great way to give specific subgroups and teams their own space while keeping everything tied together and manageable by a single super admin and sub-admins.

Finding the right Theme

Depending on your requirements, there are several themes to choose from, it’s all up to you if you want to put an emphasis on documentation, or an internal social network, or a forum, or announcements, or any number of other things.

Here are a few specific themes that you could choose from to get started:

Thrive Intranet/Extranet WordPress Theme

You can launch Social Networking, Forums, Online Shop, Project Management, or even E-Learning. It also helps you build a WordPress based intranet for your company so that your staff and members can easily share information, files, events, docs, tickets, messages, and forms. 

Woffice – Intranet/Extranet WordPress Theme

A Multipurpose Intranet WordPress theme, fully adaptable to a wide range of applications including Business & Government Intranets / Extranets, School Networks or any Community Network and Associations/Charities. Demo

Events Theme

If you are hosting events you would need to choose the right events WordPress theme, to be able to promote your event online and create a resource that makes it easy for your target audience to see why they should register for your event. The folks over at athemes, have a comprehensive article about 33+ Best Events WordPress Themes 2019 that you want to read before you choose the theme for your event website.

Adding Intranet Features with Plugins

You choose a theme, now you need to choose the plugins that will give the functionality that makes your intranet stand out and provide the functionality with your users’ needs. Here is a list of plugins that are useful to add functionality to your WordPress intranet.

BuddyPress

It helps you build any type of community website using WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.

BuddyDrive

A BuddyPress plugin that uses WordPress built-in features for the management of its post attachments to allow the members of an intranet, community to share a file or a list of files thanks to the BuddyDrive folders.

BuddyDocs

Adds collaborative workspaces to your BuddyPress community. Part wiki, part document editing, part shared dropbox.

rtMedia

Lets you add Photos, Music, Videos & Albums to BuddyPress. Supports mobile devices (iPhone/iPad, etc) and automatic audio/video conversion.

Knowledge Base

Simple and flexible knowledge base plugin for WordPress

Revolution Slider

A responsive WordPress Slider Plugin that displays your content. Whether it’s a Slider, Carousel, Hero Scene or even a whole Front Page

Visual Composer

A page builder plugin for WordPress build any layout you can imagine with intuitive drag and drop editor.

Visual Form Builder

Visual Form Builder is a plugin that allows you to build and manage all kinds of forms for your website in a single place.

Project Management

WP Project Manager is a web-based project management software for WordPress, that comes with file sharing, frontend feature, task list, calendar, milestone, private messaging and discussion features. It also has some add-on to enhance more functionality.

WP Polls

WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and CSS styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selections of answers.

The Events Calendar

Create and manage events with ease. Get professional-level quality and features backed by a team you can trust. The Events Calendar will help take your site to the next level.

bbPress

bbPress is forum software, easily setup discussion forums inside your WordPress.org powered site.

All-In-One Intranet

Provide a single sign for intranet privacy. It doesn’t really work if just anyone can view and/or login to your WordPress site.

Conclusion

WordPress is a great platform for creating an organizational intranet, extranet or a community site. With the plugins and themes available to WordPress there’s really not much it can’t do.

Are you interested in using WordPress as an intranet? Need help setting one up? Get in contact or comment below.