I have been dropping hints about a secret project which I have been working on for quite some time and now it’s time to reveal it.
RoloPress
The secret project was RoloPress, a WordPress based, open source contact manager, which I was developing with my friend Steve Bruner. The main distinction of RoloPress is that it is an application build on top of WordPress and is not a separate application with is tied up with WordPress.
Features
Some of the notable features of RoloPress for end users are:
- All admin tasks can be performed from front-end itself. You don’t need to visit the admin area.
- Ability to add/edit contacts
- Ability to add/edit companies
- Ability to add/edit notes about contacts or companies
- Has lot of readymade widgets (around 8 in the initial release)
Developer features
RoloPress follows WordPress Plugin architecture and provides lot of features for developers to play around.
- Highly extendable API
- Lot of custom hooks and filters
- Look and feel can be easily modified by creating child themes
- Most of the existing WordPress Plugins will work out of the box
- Easy to extend (If you know how to write a WordPress Plugin then you can easily write Plugins for RoloPress)
Release
The initial plan was to show the preview in WordCamp NYC (Now you know why I was interested in WordCamp NYC 
) and release it on 16-Nov-2009. But during the preview session, Matt (founder of WordPress) gave some interesting feedback and we are working on them now. Unfortunately these changes are not backward compatible and so we have held back the release till those changed are incorporated. So you have to wait for sometime
For those who can’t wait, here is a presentation about RoloPress which was used in the preview session in WordCamp NYC.
