I was just trying out 37 Signals‘ highly-successful Highrise platform, and I must admit that I was underwhelmed.  It seems that it would be pretty easy to pump out a WordPress theme with similar/better functionality. Plus, I could customize it to meet my exact needs and not be bothered with extra features that I will never use.

In a nutshell, Highrise does two things that I need:

• Track bids/deals
• Track contacts/people/relationships (i.e. CRM)

Creating the bids/deals portion would be a simple matter of using categories to for “proposed deals” and “accepted deals”.   We could then add post meta data for “Who is this deal with?”, “Name the deal”, “Describe the deal”, “How much?”, “Category”, “Who is responsible for the deal?”, and “Who can see this deal?”  The notes for the deals could be stored in the initial post as well as in follow-up comments to the post on the front end of the site.

Tracking relationships with people could be done in a very similar manner.  We could create a post category for “contacts” and then add meta data for “First Name”, “Last Name”, “Title”, “Company”, “Phone”, “Email”, “IM”, “Skype”, “Website”, “Twitter”, and “Address”.  Then add initial notes in the post content.  Use the WordPress commenting system for follow-up notes.

Sounds pretty simple.  The proof will be in the pudding.  I plan on giving it a go tonight.

Interested in the theme when it’s complete?  Let me know!