Help me choose the appropriate social networking / content management tool.
July 2, 2008 12:11 PM   Subscribe

Someone at work is trying to create a professional social network with some content management requirements. I have a desired feature list in hand but don't know what product to recommend... can you help?

Here's the list of features that my colleague would like to implement:
  • Allows users to register and join without approval
  • List of users
  • Ability to connect with other members (add friends)
  • Share contact information, professional affiliations, research interests
  • User contributions to the site are listed in the user profile
  • Threaded discussions with user avatar
  • “Who’s online” feature
  • Internal messaging
  • Polling
  • Ability to send email to all registered users
  • Customizable interface (preferably CSS)
  • Ability to assign user roles (administrator, contributor, etc.)
  • Ability to post files, news, links, and other content (for certain user roles)
  • RSS feeds
  • Printer-friendly version of content
  • Ability to email content from the site
  • Site chat feature to interact with users currently online
  • Wiki
  • Grouping features
  • Post photos
Ideally, we'd be looking for a hosted app or an app built on php/mySQL that we could host ourselves.

Any ideas?
posted by RossWhite to Technology (9 answers total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
Drupal does lots of what you're asking for out of the box. To add functionality and to theme the site, I suggest hiring a seasoned Drupal developer.
posted by bryanzera at 12:38 PM on July 2, 2008


phpBB
posted by WizKid at 12:49 PM on July 2, 2008


Have you also checked out what Ning offers as a hosted service?
posted by donovan at 12:50 PM on July 2, 2008


Yeah, Drupal can definitely do that stuff though it will take a fair bit of customization to make all those puzzle pieces feel like a cohesive whole. I helped build www.fastcompany.com in Drupal last year; the capabilities are definitely there but the details take ime to iron out. Ning has a similar feature footprint though the customization options are a bit limited.

http://www.kickapps.com/ might also have something worth checking out.
posted by verb at 1:27 PM on July 2, 2008


Social Engine fits the bill to a T.

PHP/mySQL/CSS, self-hosted, white-label (no ads or branding). From what I understand, it is ridiculously configurable, and has an active development community.

Good luck!
posted by milqman at 1:55 PM on July 2, 2008


Jeremiah Owyang's list of white label social networking platforms is worth picking through.

Ning is good if you are OK with a hosted solution. PeopleAggregator is an interesting, blog-focused, open source solution. Jive Software's Clearspace is a great (non-free) collaboration/forum solution growing into a social network platform.
posted by troyer at 2:03 PM on July 2, 2008


check out Elgg.
posted by roue at 2:18 PM on July 2, 2008


Response by poster: I found this site today and it seems to have many of the features we're looking for... wonder what it's built on...
posted by RossWhite at 6:28 PM on July 2, 2008


I'm a fan of the Drupal route, especially if you have someone on board who knows what they're doing.
posted by thedanimal at 8:39 PM on July 2, 2008


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