Social Networking Software

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Comment by Buck Lawrimore on January 3, 2009 at 1:24pm

During the past few days I have spent many hours trying out two social networking software programs: kickapps which now supports Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal front ends, and Buddypress with the integrated (ha) bbpress module.

My problem with kickapps is that unless you pay a bundle, their social networking program features a big ugly ad across the top of the main page. That is how they justify providing it for free. Also you are supposed to create widgets in their widget studio, which is far from self-explanatory, and somehow embed them in your front end. I tried Wordpress but of course embedding html code in a Wordpress home page is not easy for a non-programmer like me.

As warned by others, Buddypress is really buggy. Combining Wordpress Multiuser, Buddypress, and bbpress, requires following some very tedious steps and code changes. Then when you're all done, of course it does not work. So you go go their forum and find out you must use an UNSTABLE version of bbpress in its alpha version. So you start over again and when you try to install the alpha version, you get an error message and can go no further. This has happened to many years. Ugh ugh ugh.

So I will probably relaunch my elgg version of clto.com (Charlotte Online) even though discussions and forums "blow up" and spread across the screen, becoming unusable. Anybody else having more success with social networking software?