We were recently given the task of designing, building and deploying a fully functioning social networking site designed for thousands of users - in just TEN MAN DAYS! How?
When it comes to rtapid build web solutions, there is only one choice - Joomla. As a CMS Solution, we know that there is no faster and more effective way.
What did the site need?
- A community section, including private messaging, a 'wall', profile information, photo/video galleries and all of the normal 'Facebook' style functions
- A Forum
- An easy way to article articles by site users with additional fields (CCK style if you know Drupal) - maybe best described as listings.
- Full Article Reviewing (including ratings)
- A section for companies to add their details (including taking payment for more detailed 'listings').
- Banner advertising with a built in payment system and full client administration
- Articles
So how did we do it so rapidly?
Day2: A major part of the site was the social networking aspect. To make this work, we purchased the excellent Jomsocial package. We installed this and fully configured it. By the end of day 2, we had a working social network system on our new site.
Day3: We needed an easy forum for site members to discuss their ideas and thoughts. The best one in existence for Joomla is Kunena. We installed Kunena and linked it to our social networking community system - Jomsocial. By the end of Day 3 we had a fully functioning forum and social network.
Day 4: Joomla has an excellent article system - but it really only allows you to add simple articles - like the one you are reading now. Searching is limited, and you can't use extra fields. Joomla articles are not really designed for members of the public using your site to fill in - they are designed for the key people who maintain your site. To get round the problem, there are a number of components for Joomla which aim to solve the problem. The key ones are Sobi2, K2 and jReviews. We opted for jReviews - the end results look great out of the box, you don't have to spend hours configuring, and there is an excellent 'paid listings' add-on available which allows you to charge people when they want to add listings (or in our case, when they want to add more detail). We installed and configured the basic module in one day.
Day 5: We congigured the 'paid listings' add on for jReviews in one morning. During the afternoon, we configured the review system that jReviews comes with, and integrated he whole thing with JomSocial. We also set up PayPal as a payment handler.
Day 6: We needed a banner advertising system. There is a fantastic module by iJoomla called AdAgency. We installed this and configured it with several spaces on our website for banner advertising. We also linked it to our PayPal account (set up the previous day)
Day 7: Our site now needed to look a little better. We purchased the artwork used on the site ffrom iStock. We also tidies up the layout and completed the menus.
Day 8: A site needs content, so we added a number of articles to the site. We also installed a Google Analytics system and set up a Google Analytics account so that we could keep an eye on the site's usage.
Day 9: The final day before go live. We spent the morning carrying out SEO. To this end we completed any missing meta tags and image titles. We also checked that our site content reflected those tags. The site had been registered with the main search engines at the start of the build to minimise the 'sandbox effect'. We also opened a Twitter account to help publicise the site. Our latest tweets are also displayed on the site.
Day 10: Site Testing and corrections
