Hello all,

I'm seriously considering using DNN for a social networking site but although I am slowly working my way through 2 Wrox books on the subject ("Professional DotNetNuke 4: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET 2.0", and "Beginning DotNetNuke Skinning and Design") I'm still a little uncertain of the way forward, or even if I'm on the right track (i.e. building onto DNN). Can you please help me to clarify a few things? What I'm aiming at is for participants to be able to configure their own 'front door' using widgets (i.e. their choice of both content and presentation). Although most will likely prefer to 'drag and drop' from a kind of catalogue, some in my community are blind and cannot use a mouse (and therefore would need to have this functionality using keyboard, guided by their screenreader). I would like members to be able to upload URLs referring to sites / resources of interest that they can describe and others can comment on in a blog-like way as well as adding - from their own perspective - tags, ratings, etc.

I mentioned social networking site because I'd like to make it easy for members to find each other and connect to collaborate or just share ideas, photos and such.

Some of the approaches that I've explored so far included:

Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Services: Despite the use of 'lists' and libraries that could have been useful, I really got bogged down trying to figure out how to make it accessible to some of my members with disabilities and gave up. Also, not everyone will be using Microsoft clients and I found it unfriendly to (for example) Mac users

"White Label" Social Networking Hosting Services like Ning and KickApps: Despite the benefits of having an almost turnkey solution to the social networking functionality, I couldn't figure a way to connect and integrate the database-type functionality of having members comment on (and rate, and tag) each others contributions short of calling services through their APIs. Although this isn't official, I've heard that it cost something like $1000 a month to use KickApps' API for this. I've also not been able to find an 'exit door' in the way of being able to export the community or their content from their servers - which, to be honest, makes me a bit nervous.

"Roll Your Own" using LAMP or ASP.NET: I'm not at all familiar with the LAMP side of the fence and although I'm more comfortable (and familiar) with Microsoft technologies, I don't have the confidence to be able to tackle this without a substantial head start...

Hence my interest in DNN :-)

My questions are...

1. Do you agree with my growing sense that (given the above) DNN is my best approach?

2. Will DNN give me the capability of being able to offer each member their own 'dashboard'?

3. Can Social Networking be integrated into DNN in a way that would enable the kind of tagging and cross-commenting described above?

4. Are there some quality 'short-cuts' (existing modules, etc.) that you can suggest that could help me to get this thing up to speed fairly quickly? (I've spent quite a bit of time exploring these other approaches and am beginning to get a bit impatient to get the site up and running)

5. Knowing what you know, if you were me, how would you go about doing this?

Thanks in advance for any advice that you can provide, and if you've read this far, thanks for having the patience to read through a post that is longer than I had anticipated it would be.

Cheers

Bill

Bill,

Have you check out http://www.activemodules.com? They have the best and most popular forum/social networking solutions for DNN. The SN module is newer and they are coming out with a new version soon.

My research has shown that if you really want max flexibility to integrate your community with DNN portal, the above is the way to go. Much more work than going with ning or the like.

Will

You might want to also look into http://www.smart-thinker.com/

You can get alot of good help with their modules on their site and in their forums. He has also built a great social networking site for poker players using his modules.

 

brian