How to build an advanced Social Network with Alfresco?

[boehlke]

Hello community!

We have a big social network running at ning.com, over 7000 members, 30000 photos…
Since we would like to support advanced collaboration features and more extensibility à la Webscript etc I evaluate is possiblity of moving the whole thing to Alfresco.

* Basic requirements are common social network features: Browsing/Searching Photos/Videos/Members, Discussions, Blogging.
* One of our requirements is advanced authorization, supporting e.g. a group moderator role for a specific "discussion group".
* We need a simple interface for standard users, who just want to view photos, discuss, blog and send messages, just like in facebook.
* We need to import all the data into Alfresco: Photos, Videos, Discussions, Messages, Blogs, Comments, Groups

How would the roadmap look like to build such a network with Alfresco?
Would we use Webscripts to build a simple user interface?

Thanks!

André

[camillus]

Alfresco looks like a pretty good software to build advanced websites for enterprises, etc., but there I don't see any opportunities to build social networking sites with Alfresco - but maybe I am wrong. I thought about use Liferay with built-in Alfresco, but also that's not what I am looking for. As well I wanted to use Day Software, but like Alfresco doesn't offer the ability to build social networking sites - but also here I can be wrong. Actually, I don't see any open source software to build, for example, a Facebook's competitor with.

What I can to do right now, is just use commercial (closed source) softwares, but I hope in the future there will be a good open source software to build advanced social networking sites… but of course we can always create additional social features with very good programmists to Alfresco :-)!

[mrogers]

Perhaps you should step back and say what features you are looking for?  

What fits with alfresco and what does not ?

There are organisations who already use Alfresco to support their "social networking site" so its very possible to use alfresco.

[marfarma]

I haven't worked with any of the Python libraries or projects I'm about to describe.  I am about to evaluate them for my own project.  Since it seems like they might be a solution for your needs, I thought I'd pass them along.

Pinax might be a good choice on the front end.  Here's the post that lead me to consider it myself.  assembling django applications

Here's a django alfresco integration that's been released as open source. The actual client implementation that led to its development is described here.  You might be able to use it with Pinax code to get yourself 90% of the way there very quickly.

As for importing your existing assets and content, here are some links to get you started:

* An article that documents how to use cmislib to import files (including metadata) into a CMIS reposi...  While they don't target Alfresco in the article, Alfresco does support CMIS – so you should be able to use the code.
* CMIS client library for Python
* CMIS page on the Alfresco Wiki

[thijsboeree]

Hi,

I am also trying to build a community site with alfresco…:

The things i want are maybe very simple:
1. a registration page
2. a profile page
3. a page where users can post images
4. an overview of all the people

I tried to do it with Django, but when i need to install django for alfresco(* Django Alfresco Code::
svn co https://projects.optaros.com/svn/django-practice/trunk/alfresco/)
, i need a username and password for the optaros site?
Am i doing something wrong?

Regards,
Thijs

[dk1]

Hi,

I am also trying to build a community site with alfresco…:

The things i want are maybe very simple:
1. a registration page
2. a profile page
3. a page where users can post images
4. an overview of all the people

Im pretty sure that this can be accomplished with Alfresco.

[benfranklin]

Does anybody have a working example of a social networking site built with Alfresco?  I think it's a great idea and have an idea for an "industry" related social networking site- I would just love to see one in action before I bit off the promise to my superiors that "they" (really meaning I…) can pull this off…

thx in advance!

[mikeh]

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