Help me choose the appropriate social networking / content management tool.

July 2, 2008 12:11 PM

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 comments total)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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