Best Social Networking Package

Hi All

I am looking to develop a social networking site and i want you help and suggestion to purchase one...

Features Needed

Forums
Chat
Blog
Payment plugins
Highly Secured...
Spam identification

Please provide your help to purchase the best of all in a single package...

Some which interested me are Social Engine,vbulletin,PHPfox,elgg but i am not sure which would be good for the criteria as specified above as i am not familiar with this before.

Multi Ip Proxy detection etc...

Hey anybody there? Please help as i am also trying my best to find the coolest SE , Anybody got any suggestion?

Boonex Dolphin... open source and you only pay for the features you use.

is that it guys? anymore suggestion. I am looking forward for some expert answers...

Boonex Dolphin is buggy as hell and even less secure! Go with Social Engine instead.

http://www.socialengine.net/?aff=dougeetx
http://www.socialengine.net

Social Engine have support , lots of templates , and other stuff as well go for social engine its best ! dolphin, phpfox sucks !, Social engine also having lots of modules like face-book ! best of luck !

Here's my recommendation :

Social Engine : Good support, works on Smarty Template, if u buy addons comes to a little expensive, is relatively secure, i am not fond of the design and it costs high to change that

Vbulletin : Far from being a social network, it is still the best Forum and a new CMS wanna be

Phpfox : Is good,has some decent features.

Elgg : Well personally not my favourite because self hosting is not a good idea and if u dont self host it, it is rather limited in its use in the long term.

Some others :

Boonex : Sucks bigtime, has all the errors that a script can have ( yeah, i was exaggerating a bit but it sure is useless)

Joomla + JomSocial : Is good and cheap but u will need custom dev work and only recommended if you have some development experience or can hire someone

Drupal : My favourite but also most expensive as you will need to hire someone and shell some decent bucks, but it does give a very good bang for the buck! IMHO

However, if the idea is long term and u have cash to invest and are sure of the prospects of your network, do not go open source way and get custom one built. Not for safety but these ( all of them) hog the network and are server intensive. Build a light one or get it done. Your choice!

Peace.

Hi thanks for the reply, That was a nice recommendation , I agree to what u said. I also did the research and came to the same conclusion. I want to know if I use Social Engine will I be able to make it secure for payments? I trust Vbulletin but i dont think it can go far as a Social Engine...
My decision is Social Engine and I wanna know more about smarty template... and also where can i go to change the SE template design and how much it would take to change the design... Please let me know the details....
Thanks for answering me.. I really appreciate your time...

do you already ear about buddypress? Its based on wordpress...

If you're starting out id definitely recommend wordpress with some of the plugins available - you can incorporate several different forums in it. Then again there's drupal and joomla, and my personal favorite is still phpnuke, but unless you know what you're doing with it, it's not that easy to add all the patches to make it work right. Nuke, for my money, is still a pretty intense system that has lots of abilities.

does anyone here like dotnetnuke? Ive used it in the past and had a lot of success with it but i havent used it much lately.

i dont like social engine because its looks almost like facebook, hand shake is pretty cool

Thanks buddy i will checkout and let you know... i hae already got SE and its amazing...

As far as SE is concerned

1. Security is fine and payments can be made through the system without much problems. That said I dont consider it very safe as there have been known bugs on the platform. Also if the scale of your community is big , SE is not very optimized IMHO. Slows down the server to a crawl.

2. The template files you can access directly within the admin panel and unless you want to just change the css and background images/colors etc , things can get very complicated. Smarty templating system distributes the code and it would be best if you read about it at

www.smarty.net


As for the DNN recommendation, its awesome if you are fine with .net development. Not everyone's cup of tea though as modifying it can be cumbersome.

How About This

I'd recommend Drupal. I don't even think you would have to hire anybody, the only thing I can think of is template design. Every other functionality you mentioned Drupal has built-in or there are official modules that would do the trick.