Social Engine – Install your own unique social network!

How about idea to built social network dedicated to independent schools?

Last week I was looking haw use SE to build social network for independent schools.

So what is the Social Engine?

“Social Engine is a PHP script that creates a social network on your website. Right out of the box, your social network will offer nearly all of the features found on today’s popular social networking sites”

With this script you can set up Facebook like network in the minutes. I liked the ease of instillation and the clean design. I saw also that there is many plugins and modules to extend basic functionality of the script.

Basic set up is running without any problems but you want to be competitive on the quickly expanding social networks market you have to profile your script regarding your niche market and add specific functionality. It is possible with different SE modules and plugins – but means additional costs for additional plugins.

My market is schools and I tried to find out how and using which plugins I will arrive to set up

SE for schools.

As usual with this profile I would like that

• users subscribe to schools and classes like in classmates.com.
• to have different profiles for schools, pupils teachers, …
• to have possibility to use forums and groups, upload videos, images, give points for activity
• run adverts to pay my bills…

Many of this functionality you can have by buying additional plugins but my main problem was how to set up a logic which will add new user to the right school and class (study year).

I wanted to have school profile with classes pupils and teachers inside. I wanted to connect the profile with the forum where members could exchange their thoughts and had

Some troubles.

• I don’t know how to build separate profile for schools and add it automatically on user subscription
• I don’t know how too build different classes inside the school profile.

After testing different solutions I decided to

Give a try with this one

• School profiles are like other user profile
• School profile are leaders of schools groups
• Groups are divided in subgroups like schools, clubs, associations….
• In schools subgroups I formed the category for each school and gave the possibility to form classes in by users.

This solution is not perfect but is the only one I found to implement schools profiled SE.

In practice this set up gives full possibilities to users to form any kind of school profile and group. The role of administrator will be how users are behaving, what types of activities they are choosing and with this observations customize the SE to their needs. This type of the solution was used by naszaklasa.pl and worked very well (17 millions of users).

What SE means for me on this tage for my personal project?

Expanses for

• SE script
• additional plugins
• specific customization (regarding emerging needs- full time staff)

Ad the stage of thinking about social network for independent schools it is to much form me – I can do it (or similar) for you :-). I will also look for other solutions.

Next one for testing will be WordPress MU.

The set up I described can be viewed under this link. Fell free to give a try and if some put comments. It is a full working site so you can subscribe, build profiles, schools profiles like in the live version.