Building your own social networking site in 24 hours

Skip to navigation
Skip to content
Jump back to the top of page

Building your own social networking site in 24 hours

You have all probably come across IT self-learning books like Sam teach yourself 'whatever' in 24 hours. While some of the books are helpful, most of them expect you to be an expert in the field even though it's aimed at beginners.

This post isn't so much about books but a web application called Dolphin for creating your own social networking site and unlike the books i mentioned above, you can have your every own site up in 24 hours (for beginners or experts). If you're a beginner you can have Boonex host and setup the site or someone with the knowledge. If you are an expert you can download it and do it yourself.

I was made aware of this when i was approached by a past client who wanted to setup a community site and asked me if i have ever used Dolphin before. Quick answer was no but i was curious to know so i went to investigate. First thing i thought about when i visited the site was Elgg but after reading through the feature list, this beast was more than what Elgg is. Of course, Elgg is still very young in this field so there may be more surprises to come. Some of you at this point would probably say, hey! Drupal can create community sites. I totally agree but with these projects it requires more than just setting up a site, you need to find and know all the right modules and build it up form there whereas Dolphin comes bundled out of the box. I guess the difference is that you can customise it in better ways using Drupal.

Amazed with all the features it promises, i began downloading both Dolphin 6 and Ray 3 (used for widgets on your site). Dolphin runs on PHP 4+, mySQL 4+ and Apache, so any shared hosting should work okay. However, Ray isn't so straight forward as it requires SSH with root access to install. This wasn't a problem for me as i run my own server anyway. But if you can't install it then Boonex does offer Boonex Media Server where they can host all the widgets for you. For a quick install it was better to use SSH because there are a lot of file permissions to set and so using FTP would have been quite a cumbersome tasks.

Once installed, you are pretty much ready to start a site, just go to /admin/ URL and login to configure your site.

For a free social publishing system aimed at people who want to run a social network site - this certainly is highly recommended. It comes an inpressive list of plugins for running and managing many types of different social networks (ie, even a subscription based site with payment).

One of the drawbacks was the lack of documentation available for Dolphin.

Finally, you can now have your every own mySpace or Facebook site. Companies looking for their own social network for use only by staff should also look into this as well.