Social networking project
The other day, I was approached by a long-time friend about building/developing a social networking web site…I was thinking to myself…are we still in 2005? We will not go into the business viability of this project, but instead, I am going to share a couple observations as I tried to do my initial due-diligence on the project. Base on the project requirement, the client wanted something done in 45 days!! so time is precious, so I initially explored open source code base on .NET…nothing!! I can’t believe I found nothing…not even commercial packages…maybe I wasn’t googling hard enough, but I was surprised.
As I was reading a bunch of social network postings…the name Elgg kept coming up, so i took it out for a spin…downloaded and tinkered with it. Installation was smooth, but after installation, I was a bit baffled…and i attribute this to me being spoiled by Magento and Wordpress.
After spending a couple hours in the admin and trying to figure out how to customize the software, I decided to give up for now…until the client decides to really go for this.
Couple observations that make open source a good open source. Things that Elgg lacked…
1. lack of good documentation from the people behind Elgg…most of the documentation are too general to be of any use.
2. user community is too small - discussion forum wasn’t very active
3. lack of plugins - there were some, but not enough plugins (again, i am spoiled by Wordpress).
Attached is a screenshot of a plain vanilla installation, nice and clean, but not enough plugins and documentations to ease the learning curve.
