Thread

I am looking for a solution to a social networking site some thing similar to orkut with features centring around the user profile
a. visitor messages / public message to the user profile (orkut calls it as scrap)
b. Video sharing by the user
c. Photo sharing by the user
the features in common like
a. forums
b. polls
c. blog (users create the blog entries a common pool not like blogger etc)

I have found ee has got a forum add-on and a has a good member management. I am not sure whether I will be able to achieve the above with any available add on either first or third party or how easy is to build the features my own. Your guidance is highly appreicated.

Hi, handiyman - welcome to the forum!

ExpressionEngine is a content-focused publishing system; not a user-focused system.  That means that giving users their own areas to publish things - weblogs, video, photo, that’s a separate “mini-site” is not something ExpressionEngine is intended to be used for.

If you want a communal blog with many authors posting to a shared resource - ExpressionEngine is a great fit; but judging from b and c - video and photo sharing, ExpressionEngine may simply not be a good fit.  There are also licensing concerns here.

If the photo and video sharing are communal then that certainly changes things; ExpressionEngine, however, is not an Orkut like system at all - with much more of a focus around content rather than user profiles.

Thank you very much Lisa for a quick reply and clarification. Is there any restriction from EE on integrating with some other usercentric systems where I can use EE for mainly colloborative contents and use other products (not sure what is available in the market… and need to do my research) for the user centric component and EE member database as the base.

Nope, we can’t and wouldn’t want to restrict your usage of other software, of course.  As long as the other software is the one delivering ay form of “mini-sites” then you’re well within our license.

For such a integration, you’d want to look at our Development Documentation.

Thanks Lisa.
I am waiting for the ee2 release so that I can avoide double learning curves on EE. In the mean time I have started playing around CI as I have read some where on your blogs that both ee2 and CI will have same code base etc.
I have got few more questions.
a. I have seen some showcase websites with events calendar. Is events calendar and the events listing pages etc is part of forums or core ee. I have searched for add ons I couldn;t find one.
b.  Forums - can they have differnt themes based on different user groups?
c. How easy to setup RSS aggregation - to dispaly news from 10 different news sites

Well, most of what you learn for EE 1.* will apply to 2.0.  We’ve stated that publicly in the sneak preview for that matter. =)

Event Calendars are simply done with the weblog with each entry being an event, and using the calendar tag.  Here’s a wiki entry on that.

Users can select their own themes in the forum; you could possibly build an extension to have a theme based on the member group, but it is not out of the box functionality.

RSS aggregation is quite simple just using the Magpie plugin, or Feedgrab to pull in entries from RSS as entries to your own site. =)