Social Networking Development - Where to start

Question

I wish to have a yoga community site build based on a social networking infrastucture. I'm not a developer, but i want to get things rolling. Budget is a issue. What development platforms would you recommend? My objective is to identify one, then look for developers who have experience on this platform.

My broad requirements are :

• users can register and provide info about what types of yoga there are interested in.
• users can interact with other geo local users.
• if a user is a yoga instructor, then they can advertise to other local yoga users.
• show local yoga places to users

TWO Questions:

1. What development platform would u recommend for me to look at?
2. and why?

Thanks,

Taroon.

Answer 1

I would try Grails. You will get results quickly with it, because it integrates all you need and is easy to learn. And it scales up when your yoga community grows.

Answer 2

You should look at existing social networking platforms as opposed to development platform. You can start from wordpress-mu/press-buddy since they have plugins and add-ons for [virtually] any situation in life. Then there's ning (jfgi), but it's close-sourced. As well as joomla or any other portal-like platform. They are open-source platforms. This allows you to easily find a developer that is familiar with that platform hence customizing costs should be much much smaller than building site from the scratch.

Answer 3

• What are the best Java social networking frameworks?
• Best Ruby on Rails social networking framework
• Is Joomla good for social networking site?

Answer 4

I suggest you take a look at OpenSocial.

Answer 5

I had a very good experience with elgg. Here on my blog I did a relatively soft collection and comparison of different social network engines. Worth having a look.

One thing not to do is to go drupal. It's powerful, but too difficult, both for you and for your users.

I also have an outstanding and still unanswered question about technical solutions to kickstart a community website. It could happen that some ideas pour into it and you can use them for your objective.

Answer 6

Drupal - drupal.org: Free open source content management system with social media capabilities and a vibrant support community. It can have a steeper learning curve than other systems but it is the superset of joomla and wordpress: it does all what they do and much much more. Since you are looking for developers then the learning curve may not be an issue as you are not imposing it on yourself.

Your requirements:

• users can register and provide info about what types of yoga there are interested in. Drupal: users can put this on their profile page - there are several plug-in modules in Drupal that provide profiling.
• users can interact with other geo local users. Drupal: forums, blog comments, posting content, "stories" etc.
• if a user is a yoga instructor, then they can advertise to other local yoga users. Drupal provides event publishing facilities, for example
• show local yoga places to users: via story content type, use of tags to identify and describe the place e.g. what facilities it has, location etc.

Comparison of Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla: http://www.compassdesigns.net/joomla-blog/How-to-Choose-Between-Joomla-Drupal-and-Wordpress.

See this book: Drupal Social Networking: http://www.packtpub.com/build-social-networking-website-with-drupal-6/book

Download the drupal package as instructed onto your hosted webspace. Drupal works very well even with the cheapest shared hosting.

Answer 7

Ning has already been sort of mentioned, but I would second the recommendation. Although it is for-fee, 20$ / year is not a bad price, esp. considering that the expensive part is not software but actual hosting (which typically runs for more than 20$ a year for kinds of things you need). You can even find hundreds or maybe thousands existing yoga-related networks there to give you ideas. I have one network there (programming related), and have had positive experience.