Community Building and Social Networks

My goals are to find something that...

[meetzah2]

Hello there,

Almost 2 years ago I started a web project that is now pretty popular in my country. I am happy with it but it seems that it reached the limit of visitors (I am on first page of Google for 95% of my keywords). I will try to increase traffic but now I want to try something bigger: I want to go worldwide.

I want to start a social network. There are good reasons for me to do that because I think that there is still room for good ideeas and improvements :P in actual sistems. The thing is that I am not such a good coder to start from scrach a new software paltform. I searched the web for something I can understand and moddify but no use: each software I found was too buggy or the support forums were emty :(

My goals are to find something that:
- is under GPL (so is open source)
- works on PHP and MySQL
- is backed by a strong community
- is modular (so I can create new features or install new features developed by the community)
- is NOT AJAX (I preffer as much plain text as possible, for easy search engine optimisation)
- support templates or easy change of the layout
for that moment that is all I can think of...

If you used some software and you wish to share your impresions, please do that.

P.S. Excuse my english. It is not my native language.

[rogerd]

Congratulations on your success so far, meetzah2. If you are looking for a well-tested social networking platform, you might need to start with a forum or CMS package and employ various add-ons to beef up social aspects. People are developing various "MySpace clones" and other ground-up social networking tools but these are relatively new.

[maximillianos]

We just launched a social networking site for a client that ties a number of niche sites together... We used the free, open-source PHP-based Drupal CMS.

[carpediem]

Drupal

[jtara]

is NOT AJAX (I preffer as much plain text as possible, for easy search engine optimisation)

Don't dismiss AJAX out of hand. AJAX can degrade gracefully, so as to accomodate users without Javascript enabled and search engines.

The book "Agile Web Development with Rails" has a great example of how to do this. The first half of the book goes through the development of a typical e-commerce site, and has you first build a non-AJAX site, and then in a later chapter AJAXifys it. But they do it in such a way that the non-AJAX functionality is preserved. It really doesn't involve a lot of extra work.

So, for example, add an item to a shopping cart. You have Javascript? It updates the cart in-place. You don't have Javascript? It gives you a full new page.

Surely this book isn't the only place these techniques are being taught. So, instead of saying "oh, that's AJAX, I don't want that", look a little closer and see if a given package is able to work both ways.

[meetzah2]

Thank you guys,

I will give a shot to Drupal.