I’ve been busy building a social networking platform the last couple of weeks on a friends hosting space. I actually promised to do this a long time ago and it just got pushed down the list some what!
I wanted to go open source rather than using paid software, though if there was better paid scripts then I may have considered those too. The scripts I considered where, VLD Personals, Dolphin, BuddyPress and Elgg.
I did briefly look at VLD again, especially after I was a reseller for a while but overall I found it to be disappointing to say the least. In terms of stability VLD is slightly less stable than some of the open source offering out there. wewehips uses VLD and having tried to use the site on several occasions I gave up due to the number of crash errors and the poor software. I’m patient when it comes to such things, but If I’ve paid £150 for something I don’t expect it to be crashing that often! VLD was crossed off the list real fast!
Next in my sight was Dolphin – The smart community builder. Yes, it is smart and there are lots of plugin’s available both free and paid software. The basic installation without the plugin’s in very heavy on the database server and the script appears to be geared more towards communities that were sharing media; films in particular. Not really on my radar at all.
The new version of BuddyPress 1.2 is pretty good as it simply adds some social networking functionality to an existing wordpress or WPU blogging platform. It adds groups, message boards, user profiles, friends lists, messaging amongst other things. I installed a system here to test. The things I don’t like is that there aren’t many compatible templates around and there are no media or picture album functionality on a per user basis.
The final platform I tried was Elgg who self pro-claimed to be the best open source social networking platform there is. I cannot be sure about that as I’m sure there are others out there waiting for me to find them. Elgg operates in a similar way to wordpress in the respect you have a core application and then you use modules or plugins to add to or change function, including the visual aspects.
Elgg is quite difficult to work with when customising the GUI as there are a multiple number of files that have to be edited. In Word Press this is handled within a theme, but in Elgg they call it a view instead. The principle is similar but is different enough to require a bit of a learning curve. I installed the customised Elgg system here and is in a beta phase.
The elgg software itself I do think it requires a heavier use of the SQL server than Buddypress since I have having a few problems with the Host at the beginning of the week limiting their “unlimited” account to a rather pathetic 3 simultaneous database connections. Luckily, the host rectified the situation after I got involved on the site owners behalf. It took a number of emails though to firstly get them to admit the issue and secondly to lift the limit on a supposedly unlimited account. In reality there is no such thing as unlimited – there are always limitations and really I cannot blame the host at all since I would do exactly the same thing!
Anyway, I’m probably going to continue to mess with the Elgg installation a bit more as time allows, but its more of a hobby project for me I’ve been doing in between everything else! And now I’m returning to everything else for the next month or so!