The 5 Best Open-Source Social Networking Software. Previously, Abhijeet has highlighted three awesome sites where you can create your own social network easily.
However, if you are one of those who wants more control of the site, including the branding, the domain name, the features, the design, the community rule, or even the database, the best way is to install and run a social networking software on your server. While there are plenty of scripts (both free and paid) that you can use to run your own social network, there are only a few that are stable, good and easy to use. Here we have handpicked 5 of the best open-source social networking software for you to choose from. 1. Elgg Elgg has just won the best open source social networking platform for the year 2008, so there is no doubt about the usability of this software.
Elgg operates on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql and Php) environment and it is easy to install and configure. Before you install Elgg, try out its demo site. 2. Check out the demo site 3. Try out the demo site. 4. 5. Building a Social Network Site in Rails. I’m not going to cover how to actually code an entire social network site in rails as all social network sites vary in their functionality (and it’ll take too long).
I will cover plugins and other things you might find useful though. Quick Start If you don’t really want to do the coding but want to get a site up and running and soon as possible, you may want to have a look at Lovd by Less by the guys over at Less Everything. Lovd by Less contains user signups, galleries, blogs, comments and various other things that you might want, so it’s a great starting block for your site. Social Network Plugins Here’s a list of plugins that I’ve found to be useful while coding my own social networking site: Restful Authentication RESTful Authentication is pretty much the defacto standard for user authentication in rails. . # To Installruby script/plugin source script/plugin install restful_authentication Paperclip Paperclip is a brilliant plugin by Jon Yurek over at ThoughtBot. Will_paginate White_list. How to Create the next Social Network. Insoshi/insoshi - GitHub. Social Networking Goes Open Source With Insoshi.
Insoshi wants to be WordPress for social networks, except built on top of Ruby on Rails instead of PHP.
We covered them in March when they presented at the Spring Y Combinator demo day. Now they’ve officially released their software for public download so anyone can install it on-premise to run their own social networks. Insoshi is not the first company to release its social networking code. Broadband Mechanics has always emphasized the openness of its PeopleAggregator platform, and even Ning, the most publicized DIY social networking company, will give you the underlying code if you request it.
It’s not even the first Ruby on Rails project to go open source. I look forward to seeing whether Insoshi is really able to build the type of developer community that’s associated with names like Mozilla and MySQL. Check out a test social network built on Insoshi here. Free software downloads. XOOPS Web Application System. Lovd By Less. Home - Mahara. The Elgg Community.