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

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

RossWhite — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:11:21 -0800

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?

By: bryanzera

bryanzera — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:38:45 -0800

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.

By: WizKid

WizKid — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:49:39 -0800

phpBB

By: donovan

donovan — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:50:44 -0800

Have you also checked out what Ning offers as a hosted service?

By: verb

verb — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:27:49 -0800

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.

By: milqman

milqman — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:55:26 -0800

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!

By: troyer

troyer — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:03:48 -0800

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.

By: roue

roue — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:18:06 -0800

check out Elgg.

By: RossWhite

RossWhite — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:28:21 -0800

I found this site today and it seems to have many of the features we're looking for... wonder what it's built on...

By: thedanimal

thedanimal — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:39:28 -0800

I'm a fan of the Drupal route, especially if you have someone on board who knows what they're doing.