Digging into custom post types

With the announcement of Anthologize (a product of the One Week | One Tool program), I started wondering about the possibilities for using WordPress as an eportfolio that was capable of producing a neatly formatted portfolio. The benefit of Anthologize is that this porfolio could be formatted as a PDF, ePub book, or as an RTF document. There are still a lot of bugs with Anthologize, but the potential is exciting.

As I was describing it to my wife, she said she thought this would be great for one of her clients. Her client is in the recruiting business and collects information on up to six potential candidates for each position they are trying to fill. This information is currently typed up and then put together in a candidate book that is presented to the firm with which the recruiter is working. My wife wondered if it would be possible to do this using WordPress and Anthologize to automate the process and provide database storage of the candidates and digital output of the book. I told her I thought it could.

As I see it we need to create custom post types reflecting the information the recruiter collects and wishes to associate with each candidate. Once those custom post types are created the recruiter would prepare the candidate book using Anthologize. The bonus would be that the recruiter could run a multisite setup and create a new blog for each placement they were working on and give access just to the client who contracted with them to make the placement. Now the client can view the candidates online via a customized candidate site or via PDF, ePub, RTF, etc. With a rating plugin they could even allow other members of the hiring process to rate the candidates by rating their associated posts on the site. I think I’ll be working on this in my spare time, referencing Alan’s series about custom post types, and keeping notes on how it might relate back to eportfolios and other things I’m thinking about in relation to my day job.