Open-source social networking sites

Strangely, there aren’t many open-source social network packages out there. Some commercial packages such as PHPFox will give you access to an “unlocked” code base, but are built off of antiquated technologies (such as using tables for layout) and are not free. Few are truly open-source, free, well-designed, and use sane development standards. Most are rather limited and are cashing in on the now well-established popularity of social network sites. Still, I firmly believe that the next stage of development for social technologies such as social network sites lies in flexible and rapid development environments, not in limited packages that come looking like a poor man’s MySpace and are difficult to customize. I haven’t heard much from them over the last year, but ELGG could be an underdog. Unltdworld.com was built using ELGG and looks good, if a bit overly-web 2.0 for my tastes. (Their version 1.0 is due out this summer)

More promising are the CMS packages out there, such as Drupal (which was used to build this site) and Joomla. These CMSs allow you to flexibly build on the range of SNS features, so they can go beyond what a “canned” SNS is able to do. One major qualm I have with using Drupal for teaching is that it’s rather esoteric. Much of the terminology doesn’t translate to other environments, and core functionality that would be vital to a classroom setting (say, how to connect to a database and retrieve data) is deeply buried. Of course, that’s the point of using CMS – to not have to construct queries or even worry about writing code. A friend of mine calls this “checkbox programming.” While these CMSs still have scalability issues, they should be considered for anybody interested in getting a site up and running in a short period of time.