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I'm going to build a social network (yes... another one). I'm thinking about using Pinax (which is Django which is Python) or Elgg (PHP).

That's the two options I know. Could you help me to choose beetwen them?

Another options?


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closed as primarily opinion-based by Jim G., joran, Luc M, Dour High Arch, DuckMaestro Aug 10 '13 at 3:53


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4 Answers

I tried a lot of social networking scripts. php: social engine(2-4), phpfox(1-2.0.5), elgg, phpizabi, buddyzone, buddypress, joomsocial and so on.. but later I discovered python, django, Pinax and it's beats all of them!! You can easily add thousands django apps in it. And you know, python is really faster than php. I advice you to strat from Pinax! It's really great! Currently I'm using Pinax-0.9a2.dev9 But I added a lot of features, apps + css3 html5 templates. As alternative, you can try to start from django-userena(provides simple registration and profiles and so on) and just add apps which you need.

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also great brand new script for social networks written in php is oxwall: oxwall.org demo: demo.oxwall.org –  MechanisM Feb 22 '11 at 15:34
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Oh, and beware of Liferat, er, Liferay, http://www.liferay.com. It's open source and it looks really snazzy, with quick results, but its users have pain.

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If you're planning to build social network with a lot of specific features, you'll find Elgg very customizable. It also has big plugins base (1,829 OS plugins, not to mention companies specializing in delivering commercial ones) and active community.

I work with Elgg for nearly 3 years now and admire high flexibility of Elgg that allows me to deliver quickly fancy features required by customers. In most cases I focus on implementing actual business logic, not the basic stuff. Also view system is pretty well designed, that allows you to not repeat yourself and quickly build complex-good looking pages.

Also Elgg is very focused (and successful in it!) on making features pluggable, so in natural way it gives you reusability of your code. There's even single plugin that convert's default Elgg install in facebook clone. As you can see, you can do almost everything with just a plugin.

Potential disadvantage of Elgg is that you need to learn it's API, but it's a must if you want to use any existing tool and not to write from scratch.

According to scalablitity, we're using modified Elgg to deliver HTML output pages between 150-250 requests per second for different pages from single box. We also did horizontal scaling of it without much trouble, so it's also good in long run, though need some tweaks to be done in out-of-the-box version.

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There are many scripts that can be used for this purposes. First of all, if you are not strong with python I would advise you to chose script written on php as it less demanding to hosting environment and there are many programmers who can handle this task. I have played for a while with ELGG and found it very basic and quite time consuming to produce something useful. It might worth a look on commercial products that have more features out of the box. Here is few of them:

PG Social Networking (800$)

Social Engine - facebook clone (250$)

DZOIC Handshake (250$)

PHP Fox (100$-300$)

Good Luck.

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