Social Networking Scripts in Review: Part1 (Drupal, HandShakes, Joomla & vBulletin)

When the myeeos project began, the lead programmer was given the chore to find the best social networking platform out there and build the back end for the future social network on it. After a few days of deliberation the recommendation to use phpizabi. For good or worse, that’s what we began developing myeeos with. There are some things about phpizabi I really like a lot, but some things I don’t like so much at all. The platform that myeeos now runs on in great in its own right and does have phpizabi roots, but that’s about it. I’m not interested in re-reviewing the few products I think are worthy of testing in search for the perfect social networking script.

In my own quest to find the perfect social networking script I have narrowed down the search to 4 candidates. Most of which probably seem like odd choices, but as this process goes on we’ll discover why I chose these particular pieces of software.

Drupal:
I’ve been a big fan of Drupal for a lot of years now. Their introduction of the now widely used PHPTemplate system was one of the first to incorporate a logical integration of markup and functionality without using an arbitrary and proprietary templating structure. Drupal is also credited with with introducing myself and many others to the method of taxonomy. Think of Drupal as being the ones who brought tagging to the mainstream developer. These aren’t really good reasons for considering it as a base for a social network, but it was good enough to reason to do some searching and find that Drupal.org has an entire group dedicated to creating social networking sites out of Drupal. To learn more about creating a social network using Drupal, I suggest you start by visiting this Drupal Social Network site Q&A.

HandShakes:
This is the only script on this list made specifically for setting up a social network. I looked at and passed over buddyzone, phpfox and a half dozen other solutions for this one because it’s the only one I have found mostly positive reviews about and their service so far has been superb. It’s a complete and well-rounded solution with a feature-set that is well thought out. They don’t nickel and dime you for modules and they offer built-in integrates with popular forum software, which to me is a huge bonus.

Joomla:
I don’t have much to say about Joomla other than there is quite a bit of support for the Joomla Community Builder extension and considering the near wordpress-like adoption rate and support for Joomla, it would be silly for me not to give it a once over. My experience with Mambo (what Joomla was once called before the creator got greedy and the community took matters into their own hands) wasn’t great and eventually led me to Drupal several years back, but that was then and Joomla is a different beast. I’m probably most excited about trying Joomla because it’s the one I have the least (read: none) experience with.

vBulletin:
I love vBulletin. Over the years I’ve become what most would consider a vBulletin master and I am absolutely convinced that there is nothing you can’t do with vBulletin and some patience. The number of quality and supported modifications is staggering and the community is more active than the community of the previously mentioned options combined. The thing that makes vBulletin an absolute must to consider though, is the fact that version 3.7 is within a week of release and sports a plethora of new features based around social networking. The tough decision with using vBulletin is whether or not to use 3.6 with its huge library of prove modifications or 3.7 with its new and improved feature-set and wait for the modifications to be ported. Of all the options I believe vBulletin has the most going for it. The only drawback for me personally is that the templates are stored in the database and they use a proprietary templating language that makes prototyping new features more of a task than some of the others here.

The reason for this post is to find out what features and aspects of creating a social network are most important to you so I can spend some time with each one and answer questions for you. What is important to me may not be important for you and the point of this investigative review is to be informative, not self-serving.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 3:55 am You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.