Social media is a buzz today! In this modern world, there might be hardly anyone who will be ignorant of the power of social media. Most of the people access social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter at least once a day. The social networking world is huge and people across the world are a part of it. People share the posts to their friends across the globe. However, what we have never thought of is developing such a social networking platform.
Social network development is not so easy! One must make a design, build the features and bring those functionalities to life. Development and deployment of a social network application is a difficult task. However, the invention of some tools has made the task of developer easier than ever. There are some open source tools which are used to build social networking platform.
So, let us breeze through some of the most important and popular open source tools for social network development.
1. BuddyPress:
This is WordPress based social networking platform, which is free, customizable and full of rich features. It helps you provide amazing features to give users unique experience. Some of the features include friend connections, discussion forms, powerful plugins, extended profiles and private messaging, to name a few.
2. Dolphin:
If you are looking out for the PHP based fully customizable and scalable social media application, you can go for Dolphin. It is one of the most popular social network development tools in market. Dolphin has got suite of social networking tools which offers features similar to that of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
3. XOOPS:
If you want to build a customized social networking website as per your needs and requirements, you can go for XOOPS, a PHP based open source content management system. XOOPS stands for extensible Object Oriented Portal System.
4. Elgg:
If you want to go for the old platform which is widely used, tested and proven, you can go for Elgg. It was not only popular in high schools, colleges and universities as a social networking platform, but also voted as the best social network platform in the year 2008. It was known for its robustness, as it was flexible enough to accommodate as per the social needs.
5. Anahita:
Out of all above mentioned social network development tools, Anahita is the most flexible and customizable open source framework. However, one needs a little of technical background and assistance to work with this. Developers love it, as it provides them with most advanced set of features.
Apart from the above mentioned social network development tools, there are others too, like Pligg, KickApps, Lovd by Less, Mixxt, Insohi, Community Engine and AstroSPACES. The above mentioned open source tools are widely accepted and used for developing social networking platforms. So, now that you are aware of the names, it is highly recommendable for you to make the use of a tool from the above mentioned ones, so as to develop a successful social networking platform.