Thread

Unfortunately, my company will be forced to start using different software if I can’t plug it into EE.

Hi Lemonman,

Please do not double post your questions. Thanks 😊

Your question doesn’t really tell me much about what you are looking for. What can’t you plug into EE? What type of site are you looking to build? If you’re wanting to make a site in the same vein as MySpace, the answer is “not anytime soon”. If you’re looking for a community blogging system where members can contribute to group of blogs, than EE is already a great system for that. It really depends on what you mean by “social networking.”

EE doesn’t give ETA’s- and in truth, I’m not sure I’ve heard of a planned social networking module- nor am I dead sure what all that would entail.

What sort of functionality are you looking for?  It might make a good feature request- or it might be something third party developers are working on.  Or- if it mimics a hosted blogging service- it might be against the license.

But I’m not dead sure on the features you’re looking for, so it’s hard to be very specific in my answers.

Thanks for the response guys.

Basically, I am looking for the ability to have our users not just read our
articles, but to login and discuss their own thoughts on these issues. Post
news worthy items of their own and promote their thoughts and their profile
within the website. Sure, they can currently “comment” and post in a
“posting forum” and “PM” in the posting forum, but they cant create their
own profile page, add comments to that page, links and perhaps some photos.
Basically, have their own page.

Well now, in reading that, it sure sounds a lot like a hosted blogging
service. So if that is the case, why is it that the license doesn’t allow
this…and couldn’t we pay extra for this?

Seems like the added costs (bandwidth etc) would all be our costs.

Hi lemonman,

You’re correct, EE is not appropriate for the type of site you describe. The complexities of social networking are discussed at length in these forums and I don’t really want to rehash all the issues here. I can summarize by saying that the license restrictions is tied directly to the technical issues involved in using EE in this fashion.

Here is a good rule of thumb. If the Content is king, EE can probably do the job. If the Profile is king, EE likely isn’t for you. For example, you can do everything mentioned above, its just not tied to a person’s profile. Members can contribute to blogs, post photos, start discussions, privately message each other, etc… but its all focused around the content, not a person’s profile.

Adding the ability to self-manage profiles, blogs, etc… is not a small task and grows in complexity the more you dig into it. That’s the primary reason for the license restriction.

If the Content is king, EE can probably do the job. If the Profile is king, EE likely isn’t for you

Great description Les.

But don’t members have a profile which they can edit through the members templates?

But don’t members have a profile which they can edit through the members templates?

Yes, but that Member Profile is quite different from a “Profile” found in a typical social networking application such as MySpace, Facebook, etc…

If the Content is king, EE can probably do the job. If the Profile is king, EE likely isn’t for you

Great description Les.

Well a small disagreement here 😊

What if members have their own small little gallery to display their own 3D creations (or small portfolio) Then content is still KING but gallery is small service

Just an example 😊

Dunno if this is a good example of that: http://www.summitpost.com is a site where content is absolutly king, however each use can upload their own photos to a gallery, in fact all their contributions are pulled together on their profile page.

A “rule of thumb” means “a starting point” not “the end of the discussion”. Of course there are going to be grey areas, exceptions, etc… The further you move away from a site like MySpace, the more viable EE becomes for the project.

Hi lemonman,

You’re correct, EE is not appropriate for the type of site you describe. The complexities of social networking are discussed at length in these forums and I don’t really want to rehash all the issues here. I can summarize by saying that the license restrictions is tied directly to the technical issues involved in using EE in this fashion.

That’s the primary reason for the license restriction.

Hey Leslie,

I understand the license restriction completely and realize that EE simply cannot do this out of the box and would have a lot of technical issues if it was attempted and I am not trying to open up the same old discussions about this again and again. but…

With that said, if someone wanted to pay a developer X amount of money to develop this functionality so it could be used with EE (maybe a module or something?), why would EE want to stop that? Granted, it would be something that EE wouldn’t provide support on, but seems like EE would be all for seeing their product pushed to the limits of what could be accomplished?

Because technical considerations are not the only reason for the restriction. There are also business issues involved that really aren’t up for discussion at this point. If you’re dead set on creating a social network application with an EllisLab product, let me highly recommend CodeIgniter 😊

Thanks Leslie. No, I’m not in need of a social network application, just curious.

As for CodeIgniter, I did have a question about it if I could go off topic for a second. I’m thinking about trying to learn PHP/MySQL (I know pretty much nothing right now), would CodeIgniter help in the learning process?

Deron.  I wrote about this some time ago if you’re interested - Learning PHP with CodeIgniter.