I’m engaged in a little experiment: using WordPress as a personal information manager, or PIM. How does this work? Categories are named for major activities and functions. Tags are the names of people directly involved. I’m using a plugin to help me generate a future “to do” list.
Tasks are entered as new posts. As information about a particular post changes, I just type in a quick comment, resulting in a post with a series of comments that show the evolution of the task.
Each task is categorized by a special group of category tags that symbolize action. These begin with an “@” symbol, as in @ToDo, @Waiting, @Monitoring, and @Urgent. When a task is completed, I change the category tag to @Done…and as the weeks roll by, the number of completed tasks continues to increase. It is particularly satisfying to see that number increase every day.
So to summarize: a post is a task or a note. Each post is categorized with at least two labels: an action label, and a topic label. If other people are involved, the post is tagged by the names of each person. When the task is completed, the action label is changed to @Done. I generate a list of items by selecting a category, and I can see what I posted by day and by month.
What is the biggest limitation? Themes. That will be my next layer of experimentation: crafting some theme changes to make the interface more fluid as posts are added and labels/categories are changed.
This experiment has been worthwhile and I plan to continue this unusual way to use WordPress. If you have tried this, or have ideas to make WordPress work as an engine driving a PIM, please do let me know!
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I'm also looking into using WordPress as a PIM. I used Google Notebook until they stopped officially development on it. I currently use MediaWiki but am looking for something simpler and more focused on PIM functionality. I looked at WikkaWikki and am trying that, but I think it will be quicker to just implement the functionality in WordPress since I've already done a lot of PHP coding for my own sites. I'll be interested to see what you come up with.
WP acts like a free-form database in the context of using it as a PIM, and tagging and categorization allow me to quickly group related items. But I haven’t yet found a theme that works really well for this. WP-as-PIM could be particularly valuable in a multi-user environment if core categories and tags were agreed upon by the group. One of the barriers has been not being able to post from theme home pages. You might take a look at the P2 theme. It doesn’t quite do what I want, but maybe you’ll get some ideas from it.