So you want to build a web site with social networking as one of its components? You can start with a social networking foundation and build a web site around it, or you can start with a web site content management solution and add social networking to it.
My purpose in this post is to gather the ingredients — the pasta and the sauce, if you will — and leave the preparation for another post. The assumption here is that the basic web site is the pasta and social networking is the sauce. Of course, it could be the other way round, depending on your business.
The most important thing is to be able to integrate the two parts.
Content Management
Content Management has been around longer and is more stable. Ric Shreves did a comprehensive study of the solutions in this space last summer. His conclusion: the top 3 systems are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Wikipedia’s list of content management systems is more exhaustive but less evaluative in its approach. My key take-away here is that the top 3 CMS systems are all based on PHP. That settles the programming language wars as far as I am concerned.
Social Networking
Here is a quick summary of technology solutions relative to social networking:
- Wikipedia Entry on Social Networking.
- About 120 social networking web sites. Are you sure you need your own? Shouldn’t you think about hanging your functionality as an application on one (or several) of these?
- Nine Ways to Build Your Own Social Network. 34 More Ways to Build Your Own Social Network. Also see included tables in both of these articles. They are both about 18 months old, which is about 40 years in internet time, but still a wealth of information. Among sites that deserve special consideration:
- Ning.
- CrowdVine, great for event planning.
- GoingOn, greate for building communities.
- Drupal vs Joomla. He picks Joomla but makes a case for Drupal as a better base engine, IMO. Another Drupal vs Joomla article.
- The Drupal site.
Finally, the startup factor. What’s the solution that is commandeering startup money? I searched venture sites Xconomy and YouNoodle, looking for startups using the technologies mentioned above. The conclusion: Drupal (3½, Acquia, GoingOn, SocialActions(½), Halosys), WordPress(2, PayBox and Insoshi) and Joomla(0).
So what do we recommend? That’s another discussion because it depends on the requirements.
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2 responses so far ↓
Chris // March 27, 2009 at 11:17 am
In terms of content management systems, don’t discount the power of enterprise web content management platforms. They can be expensive, but by the time you’ve spent resources to get an open-source system configured and launched, you might be pretty close anyway.
They also have the benefit of applying best practices from across their customer bases, and often have pretty powerful functionality – analytics integration to automate content from straight within the UI, personalization to rearrange content dynamically based on each visitor’s intent and behavior, etc.
In terms of social network building, Ning is fantastic.
Lester // March 28, 2009 at 7:35 am
This is really very helpful. I have been researching on how to integrate both-a really cool website with a doze of SEO..Thanks a lot for the information!