Use joomla! Build a social network site

Social network functions are increasingly favored by various sites, and the implementation of social network sites is not as difficult as imagined. Joomla! Is a popular open-source CMS. In fact, it is not just a CMS, but also a site development framework platform. This article will introduce how to use joomla! Build a simple social network site.

Objective and Requirement Analysis

The goal of this project is to cultivate business relationships by providing free network and support opportunities to users. The following is a simple requirement analysis.

How will people use this site?

Users can create their own content and activities, and they can also comment on past content and activities.

How will they communicate with each other?

People will communicate with each other by creating circles, messaging systems, blogs, and articles.

How much control do I need to give users?

The user has all permissions for content, activities, and comments. The administrator can supervise these activities.

Is there a way for users to generate revenue for the site?

Users can purchase banner advertising spaces on different pages.

Based on the above questions, we can establish a list of requirements so that we can find the right joomla! Plug-ins implement these functions:

• The message and comment system allows users to provide feedback and interaction to the content they have created.
• Activity creation and registration
• Blog
• Circle
• Banner advertising system
• A forum for discussion

Joomla! Extended Library

Find appropriate plug-ins

Any image like joomla! In this CMS community, there will be a lot of uneven extensions to choose from. A poor extension can crash your site, but joomla! There are many good extension libraries, and each extension in the library has comments and scores. Below are some good joomla! Plug-in resources:

• The joomla extension directory (Jed)
• CMS Market
• Best of joomla!

Finally, we select the following extension:

Jomsocial

Most of the core features we need are included in this component. It also has a plug-in system to add new features later. Details ..

Eventlist

This part includes activity creation, management, plug-ins, registration, and other functions, which can be well integrated with jomsocial. Details...

Myblog

This part will be joomla! And can be integrated with jomsocial. Details...

Kunea

This part provides us with a support forum. User data can be shared with jomsocial. Details...

Jreviews

This part provides a comment function that can be integrated with jomsocial's event list. Details...

Jomcomments

Another comment system allows users to comment on the content created by users, which is also integrated with the Core Component jomsocial. Therefore, the comment can be displayed on the user profile page. Details...

Ad agency

This component allows users to easily deploy advertisements on pages. Details...

We are painstaking in selecting extended parts. We need to ensure that these selected parts are well supported, have a good development team, can be integrated with each other, and can be easily customized.

The following is the default jomsocial template.

Note that many of the expansion components we selected above belong to the commercial version. The core component jomsocial is not cheap. If you don't want to spend money, there are some free substitutes, for example, community builder is a high-quality joomla! Extension: supports most jomsocial functions and supports many plug-ins that can be integrated. We can also go to joomla! Find some open-source comments and AD extensions. Amy Stephen and some other developers are creating a great blog extension, tamka, whose beta version should be launched soon.

Implementation

Use joomla! We will install these extensions to the site. Once these extensions are completed, the rest is to configure and optimize these extensions. The following is a template for jomsocial.

Jomsocial Configuration

Jomsocial configuration is not difficult, but we want to build a social site, so you need to do a lot of initialization design, including:

• Create original circle
• Create user data fields
• Create a user Credit System
• Custom themes

Jomsocial has many template themes to choose from. They can also be used to cover the design of the entire site.

Activity list control dashboard

Activity list

It is very important to allow users to create their own activities. You should create some initial activities. eventlist can implement these functions. You can edit the appearance CSS on the management interface to be consistent with the whole site. Finally, we need to install the jomsocial plug-in integration tool.

Blogs, comments, and forums

These extensions can be integrated into the menu system of the site through extensions.

Complete

The extensions we selected above are not difficult to deploy. Basically, they all have template files that can be customized to ensure consistency with the entire site.

The following are some completed projects based on joomla! For your reference:

• CMS Market
• U. N.'s CoolPlanet
• Qaachen.de
• Sogrand
• American Ghost Hunters
• Sanctuary for gamers

Source: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/build-a-social-network-using-joomla/
Source: comsharp CMS official website