Ask YC: Open source platform for a social network with lots of UGC(structured)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305987

by jyothi • 18 years ago

11 16 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I want to put up a quick prototype of a community based site with lots of structured user generated content. Support for multi-media content is preferred. Please suggest.

I need an open source solution rather than a hosted platform.

I am considering Insoshi - http://portal.insoshi.com/. Drupal with specific templates might work too.

Anything more robust and cleanly designed ?

PS: I would essentially build on top of the platform. I expect to have lot of changes in layout and interactions. As long as I cut down the development effort on the common things - sign up, profile page, connections, feeds etc i am good.

dnaquin2• 18 years ago

Pinax http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J91Ownq-7g

jyothi3• 18 years ago

Ah python. I am more comfortable with php, ruby, java and perl. But can hack anyway if its going to be a huge plus using pinax in terms of features etc.

But what I infer from the video and James Tauber blog is that it is far from being mature and not ahead of drupal either. Your thoughts ?

dnaquin2• 18 years ago

I mean the advantage to other options mentioned here is building on top would be easier than a CMS. But if you're more comfortable with ruby, go with something on rails, not Django. I'm sure there's an equivalent project.

umangjaipuria• 18 years ago

Wordpress? It's really extensible. And you'd get a lot of help from the open source community for any plugins that you might write.

greatreorx2• 18 years ago

Unless you aren't interested in using Ruby on Rails, you might want to check out LovdByLess:

http://lovdbyless.com

jyothi3• 18 years ago

thanks for the link. Seems to have a bunch of features I am interested in. I see that it has had close to 17K downloads and a quick search didn't result in many reviews or fan following.

How mature is this? Would you have a first hand experience using this platform by any chance ?

greatreorx2• 18 years ago

It's only about 6 months old. My only experience was getting it up and running locally and testing out the functionality. It took a couple of hours to get going (mostly due to updating gem versions). From my standpoint I was happy with how it looked. I had considered Wordpress and Drupal, but I liked the smaller, more manageable codebase - even if it meant I may be fixing bugs in the project code as I went.

I hadn't checked in on the project in awhile. I'm surprised it's not more active. FYI it looks like there was a fork recently and Luvfoo is being more actively developed (but no existing community)

http://www.justinball.com/projects/

sonink• 18 years ago

I hope you know that there is nothing that Drupal can't do.

jyothi3• 18 years ago

To an extent I agree. Drupal is probably the most matured platform with tons of templates and plugins.

But I felt its a bit too heavy and it is php. Last resort I would use that. Just wondering if there is anything new more suitable and lighter.

gregwebs• 18 years ago

Rails

http://www.actsascommunity.com/

http://www.missingmethod.com/projects/community_engine/

http://beonebody.org/

http://www.missingmethod.com/2007/01/08/how-to-build-a-socia...

jotto• 18 years ago

http://wiki.ringsidenetworks.org/ is a reverse engineered Facebook with an application platform.

trickjarrett• 18 years ago

You also might check out www.elgg.org as they just released version 1. I played with it but the project never took off so I don't have a great deal of experience with it.

Wesmax27• 18 years ago

May I ask why you need an open source solution? My company does exactly what you are looking for, but it is a hosted solution.

Email me if you're interested in discussing further.

wbarrow@realitydigital.com

Ask YC: Open source platform for a social network with lots of UGC(structured)

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