What's the best development platform for a social networking website?

Question

Before everyone groans and says: "What another one?" This is (initially at least) a private one with about 100 users very bespoked to our needs. Are there any existing application frameworks that can be used and easily reshaped into our requirements or if not, what's the best choice of tech for each tier?

Answer 1

It depends on your web framework. If you are using Django, then go with Pinax. If you are using Rails, you can find answers here

Answer 2

There is a Opensource Social engine called elgg on http://elgg.org/.

Our work group at the university uses it for documentation and organization purposes and it works quite well but it is not customized in any way, don't know how good that is possible.

Answer 3

i would suggest drupal. it runs on php/mysql and would allow you to set up a lot of things out of the box by installing various modules. depending on how comfortable you are coding php you could then extend it to do whatever you want.

Answer 4

Instead of writing your own from scratch or hosting the code yourself, you could use something like Ning, see http://www.ning.com, or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ning

Answer 5

From your other posts, I assume you're a ASP.NET programmer. If you want a fully customizable platform built on top of ASP.NET, I'd look at Community Server. If you're looking for a Open Source platform built for ASP.NET, DotNetNuke is a great option.

Answer 6

php/mysql rocks and most things and if your looking for a true social networking app then look at the facebook api which you can modify to suit your needs by the sounds of it.

also php framworks can allow for quick building of apps like cakephp

hope this helps

Answer 7

You can also use Communifire, a scalable, flexible social networking platform built on ASP.NET/C#.