What will be best for Social Site and Community

Hi Everyone,

We are working on a website which is having a decent number of visitors per day. But they don't stay for more than 1 minute on the site and leave. We are looking at some options to add some stickiness on the site.

So, thinking of start a social network on the site.

Can you suggest which script/ software will be the best for PHP / Ruby platform.

Thanks for your time.
Gurpreet

 

SocialEngine.net has a platform which seems promising

 

Dont know about Ruby ... but I'd say check out Drupal - and perhaps a Drigg addon... Flexible and powerfull, so you can go anywhere from there.

 

Yeah, Drupal is powerful for social networks...I have seen some really great drupal sites...www.teamsugar.com is one

 

Thanks to everyone who commented.
The site is currently using Drupal. I would like to tell one thing here.

Everyone who thinks that Drupal is open source and things are easy and free may be wrong.
We have tried to install many modules, get support for those modules.

Even some small customization is very expensive. At times, some modules have some flaw and the programmer who has offered it doesn't offer any support. Or if the bug fixes comes, they are quite expensive.

There are some nice companies who make really cool drupal sites, but they charge anywhere between $10000 - $20000.

For this much of money, one can get some really nice, custom system, started from scratch.

I do not think there is someone who is good at drupal and is doing work at low cost. I tried to find programmers on Scriptlance, and the response was very poor. They can only install some small things but can't change much.

As the site already has Drupal, we are looking forward to run some standalone system.

I checked PHPiZabi, it seemed nice.

Also, i would like to request that we are looking for something which is fast and doesn't need long signup forms.

Something which happens quickly and members are seeing more information about others in an easy way.

 

i think phpcow is a good one

 

Have a look on ELGG. Opensource, well maintained and has many addons free of charge
The only thing is the user-interface, which has to be adopted as I don´t like it.
But no prolem to do, as you just need to put some placeholders in a new page and change the CSS

 

I asked for something for social networking, phpcow is a script for news websites / CMS.

The website is currently using Drupal which is working fine. the aim is to start some community action, for which we are looking for some script or solution.

 

On what level?

Here R some features that may be used in a social website... I have made my own rank on 1 (basic) to higher (more advanced).

As U understand social networking does not giv much of a clue what U really want.

1. blog
2. topics chategories
3. Guestbook
4. blog reader comments
5. articles
6. forum
7. PM between members
8. RSS (kind'a automatic news links)
9. subscription
10. newsletter
11. polls
12. surveys
13. sandbox (playground for members, settings, skins and more)
14. member blogs
15. quizies

Still, today some people talk about social websites as a blog or perhaps in lucky case a blog+forum... and there R some great communitys that stay at that level and R very well visited, perhaps over 1000 members. Still others demands stuff like galleries and wiki (groupware).

But, to this first general wish from U there R also other VERY IMPORTANT issues, like....

# The level of customization (artistic or tech) U need, like and understand.
# Do U know, HTML, XHTML, principles of CSS or even PHP or Java? (or want to learn)
# Number of members and postings.
# number of administrators /authors
# security level (captcha, extensive user profiles etc.)

Hannibal

 

thanks for sharing some nice ideas.
Any clue, which script is offering all of these features with less of pain and server load.

 

stay away from vastal's buddyzone- very bad coding. i used to run a social networking site for european exchange students on phpfox v1.1- i'm also looking at an opensource solution called OpenPNE but the project is based in Japan and they haven't globalized the platform yet so it may be another while before it's of any use to the international commnity.

my phpfox license is for sale (check my sig) so let me know if you're interested. you can contact phpfox to verify my license before purchase if you decide to take it.

 

u want blog like website??

 

you can check pligg.com which is really cool i have installed pligg on my website indiantags.com its quite good open source

 

Check here some reviews about social networking software: www.mytestbox.com (SocialEngine, Webnetwork , osTube and PHPmotion )

 

Why don't you link to the actual sites!

Thanks anyways!

 

Because I thought he wants to read some detailed reviews before going to the actual sites (and there are links there to the actual sites).

I guess it doesn't hurt to have more informations (and not only from the official sites)...

But if that disturbed you then sorry....

 

Well when you link 4 or 5 it should be to the software site, maybe add a link saying read more detail at my blog where I posted comments about the software or something lol