Thread

Although I am not professionally involved in web development, I have selected EE simply because of what it is…. and isn’t.

EE is a content management system.  Or simply put it gives you all the tools you need to manage your content.  Plug-ins, extensions, and modules provide the bells and whistles.  I have learned from experience that nature abhors a vacuum.  If there is a big enough demand for certain bells and whistles, someone will come along and make them.

If I have learned nothing else form the EE community, it is that I often end up in the minority when it comes to certain bells and whistles I want; and therefore, it will be up to me to either create my bells and whistles or contract someone to make them for me.

The alternative is that you end up with a product that tries to be all things to all people, and ends up falling short.

Which brings me back to EE everytime.

Herb

EE can’t be all things to all people, that’s obvious but important to write down since its one of the reasons we rewrote EE 2.0 as a CI application. While we, as the first party developers, can’t make EE everything to everybody, what we can do is provide a much better foundation for building businesses and communities around EE as a platform, which in turn will bring more features to EE.

Will these be Social networking, something else? A lot of that is for the community to decide both in the feedback they give us directly and in the 3rd party add-ons developers choose to create and the community chooses to use and support. 

Remember, when EE 1.0 launched it was a beginning, not a final statement. Between 1.0 and 1.6.4 there were literally hundreds of features, add-ons, modules created based on real world feedback. These features didn’t just come from us, but from the community as well. 2.0 will be much the same way. Its a new beginning of possibilities that the community can build on.

With 2.0 on CI, we expect that approach to EE to increase. If you’ve never ventured into the CI community, then you should know its full of php/mysql experts. There is this whole other side to EllisLab now in the CI community that opens up a lot of possibility that simply did not exist when 1.0 launched. Its going to be very interesting to see what happens.

Maybe I’m misreading something, but doesn’t the EE license specifically prohibit development of social networks?

http://expressionengine.com/knowledge_base/article/myspace_blogservice/

No, it prohibits autonomous blog hosting for 3rd parties. Some equate that with “social networks” but there are a large number of social networking features that have nothing to do with that sort of thing.

The primary reason behind that restriction is technical. EE is not designed to do that and self-hosted applications where there isn’t tight control over the server are generally bad environments when it comes to scaling such an application.

Oddly, but typically, I just learned I may have to implement a social networkish site in the next few months. Thankfully, being a hobbyist these days, it is a small project to start. Anyway, I looked at the Buddypress verbiage with an eye to informal comparison with EE.

Planned Buddypress functionality to the left; similar EE features/programmability available in 1.64 - ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘programmable’ to the right. Your insights and corrections appreciated.

BuddyPress - EE
Extended profiles - programmable.
Personal blog - no.
Private messaging - yes.
Friends - programmable.
Groups - one per member.
The wire - no.
Albums - programmable.
Status update - programmable.

Though administering multiple blogs is a perennial EE feature request, even WordPress deprecates it for BuddyPress, so it’s probably not a show-stopper. Anyway, reasonably useful bloggability can be shared between members of an EE group.

‘The wire’ refers to the ability for a member to post to another member’s profile. I don’t know of a way to give access safely in EE for a member to do this without awarding them blanket administrative rights to another member’s profile. Danger, Will Robinson!

Groups - this is a show-stopper. I judge the direct assignment of friends and the creation of groups by members as the key differentiators for this software category. Unless EE implements one member -> multiple groups, I see no way to simulate this.

I agree entirely both with the long-stated position that EE can’t be all things to all people as well as the desirability of the community developing modules based on the requirements of their own customers and applications. However, it is another matter if EE’s architecture blocks the development of social networks worthy of the name.

Granted, social networking is ‘just’ a way of associating members, groups and their content together across multiple media and web services. But if a CMS can’t ‘content manage’ this multi-way set of relationships-records, I fear it will inevitably (and justly) fall behind as a (CM)System.

I hope one of the geniuses in the EE boiler room will someday explain where EE will go (positively speaking) in this area or, equally acceptable, help us understand why it isn’t part of the vision. Then, we can think about integrating EE (where possible) with other industry pieces when customers require social network software solutions. At a minimum, I’m not sure why an impenetrable cone of silence surrounds any commitment to enhance member groups, even if this will be delivered on the same future day-to-be-named-later as the fabled and fabulous commerce module 😊

As I said, insights and corrections of all kinds most welcome.

In my opinion, “following” discussions/comments/posts/edits/purchases of our friends (or anyone who we find interesting) is a crucial next-generation publishing technology. It helps us to smartly filter and personalize the onslaught of content. The converse would also be nice, we might want to enable bozo filters. Favorite-ing things isn’t as critical, but is still helpful in this arena.

I also find that clients are looking into membership strategies for their sites, including for-pay soft-content and subscription systems (time/date expiration, or to limit by X number of “issues/episodes/files/volumes”). To my (perhaps not fully informed) knowledge: smooth, simple, practical solutions are almost non-existent.

Of course adding “pipes” in and out of the decentralized social web/blogosphere is also a key component in future publishing platforms.

I haven’t used EE yet, so maybe these things are already very easy to do.

I know this post has been dorment for a while but I wanted to let you know that we’re starting the testing phase of our new User Groups Module for EE that will allow you to let Members of your site create, manage, and join/leave their own groups… another step towards a more social EE.

If you’re interested in testing, or simply interested in the module, check out this thread:
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/113864/

Thanks,

Doug