Looking for advice for building gaming social network

Hi guys,

First of all, I would like to introduce myself, I'm new here. I'm Spanish so my English may not be to good, but I hope you can understand me

I have in mind creating a gaming network, something like www.ugame.net. This project is too big for programming my own PHP framework for it, so I thought in using a social networking CMS for it.

I have looked ad Boonex's Dolphin 7 and it looks really promising, but I haven't found of any solution/extension that allows to have game reviews/sheets.

I'm looking for a solution (for Boonex's Dolphin 7 or any other CMS) that allows me (either by default or adding extensions):

- To create gaming reviews and sheets: a picture of the cover, some description and, if possible, user rating.

- To have an integrated forum with extended profiles.

- To have (maybe in the profiles, integrated) a space where users could define which games they own/want or which games they are playing.

I have found that with Joomla I could accomplish something like that but it turns out that: first, I can't find any solution that allows users to mark owned/wanted games (I find it strange that there isn't any component like that because it can be widely used: like in car websites to define users' cars, a gadget website to define users' gadgets...). Please correct me if there is any solution for Joomla to accomplis this.

An second, I think that social solutions for Joomla, like JomSocial, aren't as deeply integrated as social networking-oriented CMS's.

Any thoughts on the project or any solution that could help me to get the desired result would be really appreciated.

Thanks!

 

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Unfortunately I haven't used Joomla in a few years now so can't really suggest any solution for that.

Do you mean, rather than have a profile field where people can simply type in the games they own/want, you want to have a sort of "directory" of games and users can mark each game as either owned or wanted from the game's main page and they'll be listed on that user's profile?

If this were me, I'd go with Drupal (version 6, since I'm not sure if everything you need is available yet for 7, but it might be). CCK to create game pages, Views to create your directory, Flag to let people mark a game as "owned" or "wanted", Fivestar to add in user reviews. There are also modules for a decent integrated forum and user profiles, friending, PMs, user badges etc. Not really sure what other social networking features you need but if you list them we can see if Drupal is a possibility.