Wendy Woudstra, writing on her blog way back in 2009 provided an interesting list of 20 WordPress Plugins for Local Business Network Sites. While some of the plugins are long gone, the list, and her comments, provide an interesting retrospective on what we had to do in those early days of WordPress as a website, not just a blog.
Plugins For Local Business Network Sites
Covering such topics as,
- Member Profile Pages
- Member Logins
- Event Calendars
- Controlling registration
- Serving Ads
...and various other functions.
Most of the plugin are still available and are useful places to start for similar needs today. You can build your own list of funtional plugins to create your own business network site or you could just use S2Member Framework for most of it.