Symphony.

I was wondering what parts of a social site would be easy and what parts require extension development... or would not be easy... and finally whether a site made by symphony can be easily optimized for performance when the number of users are large and processing is heavy.

some feature of social apps I thought of:

• registration
• profile
• twitter like feed
• friends list
• groups
• chatting
• messaging
• photo/video upload
• various tags that connect users
• api

@gransar - actually, I know of one Symphony user, @jean-luc, that built a social network (with Symphony) around Whiskey connoisseurs at connosr.com. Here's a thread about it.

I'm planning on building a social type of site using the new members extension. It's really flexible right out of the box, though I'd be curious to know if there were issues that people know of that I'm not as apt to think about as as a designer. Security? Friending? Member profiles? It all seems pretty straightforward with members.

None of these things are considered "out of the box" but if you consider that Symphony has:

• shortly will have a Members extension for user management and permissions
• the ability to create and update entries
• the ability to link entries together
• the ability to upload files

Instead of thinking of the features themselves, think of what they actually are.

A "like" is just an entry that is related to another entry (linking a user to a likeable object). A "friend" is the same thing (linking a user to a user). Symphony doesn't support a "friends list" out of the box, but has the means to build one:

• a Users section (name, email, password etc.)
• a User Friends section (linking a user to a user)

To befriend someone, you would create an entry in the User Friends section linking the two users together. To show a friends list, create a data source that pulls the appropriate entries from here.

Photo/video upload can be satisfied by a regular File Upload field, but if you need to encode these videos for web viewing then you'll need to build something yourself.

Thanks for your helpful responses everyone.

I had looked at a thread asking if a website like twitter could be developed with symphony and the response was Ruby on Rails would be better suited. Therefore I thought multi-user sites are symphony's achilles heel. Social sites' distinctive feature is following other users, and receiving what they post, upload, and say to others...

I think www.connosr.com is truly elegant and it answers many of features I had asked about. They don't allow uploading your own whiskey though ...(perhaps every whiskey out there has been listed by the admin).

I had looked at a thread asking if a website like twitter could be developed with symphony and the response was Ruby on Rails would be better suited.

I'm not sure I understand the comparison here, sounds like apples to oranges.

I think the comparison between a cms and web framework can be a bit blurry indeed...

I don't have much to talk about since I'm not familiar with symphony -- but I will change that soon.

Its so nice to see connosr.com having grown in member size and features ... We should compile successful examples here and add a new category of "social" sites in the showcase.

My BoxedUpFun site includes social features.