Social networking has quickly become a very popular activity on the Internet, particularly with sites such as Facebook and MySpace. When it comes to creating social networks there are many options to chose from, including off-the-shelf systems, making use of existing social networks (for example, building a Facebook application or creating a Facebook page), or building something yourself. While it may be easy to find existing solutions, the only way to have one looking and behaving exactly as you want is to build it yourself.
By initially developing a light-weight Model-View-Controller-style framework with PHP, which can easily be extended to give us a stable and solid platform to work with making common tasks easier and giving us a structure for our social networking code, we can rapidly develop a custom, powerful social networking website.
Within the first few chapters, you will have a suite of files that deal with template management, database management, user authentication management, and e-mail sending. Once this is in place, social networking-centric features can be rapidly developed and plugged into the framework, including user registration and dealing with forgotten details, user profiles, building connections with users, sending messages, sharing information, forming groups, a Developer API, and events and birthday calendars.
At the end of this book, you will have a powerful social networking platform that can take the user all the way from the signup process to forming relationships and creating groups of users. The platform is developed in a very flexible way, so the needs of any social networking site can be met, with new features easily and quickly added in as the needs of the site change.
This book doesn't just stop with how to develop a social networking platform; there are many other topics, which any developer should consider such as marketing, search engine optimization, backing up and restoring the site, and how to deal with scaling problems when the site gets popular. All of these topics are discussed too, leaving you not only with a solid social network, but with hints, tips, and advice on how to maintain it in the long term and deal with any challenges on the way.
Chapter 1, PHP Social Networking, looks into the growing popularity of social networking, including popular social networks, different ways to create or utilize social networks, and discusses what we will be creating throughout the course of the book.
Chapter 2, Planning and Developing the Core Framework, discusses several architectural and design patterns, including Model-View-Controller, Registry and Factory, the planning and subsequent development of our skeleton MVC-style framework with template, database, and e-mail management.
Chapter 3, Users, Registration, and Authentication, extends our development framework with user authentication classes, and then walks through development of registration and login features for users, as well as reminders for forgotten details.
Chapter 4, Friends and Relationships, looks at allowing users to connect with one another, either by adding them as friends or establishing custom relationships with one another such as a co-worker or family member.
Chapter 5, Profiles and Statuses, walks through the development of profiles for our users as well as a flexible status system so users can update their friends and contacts with what they are doing.
Chapter 6, Status Stream, discusses how to collate user statuses and activities to show a useful stream of status updates for a user's particular network, as well as for administrators to see how the network is growing.
Chapter 7, Public and Private Messages, enables users to communicate with one another by implementing a simple message system.
Chapter 8, Statuses—Other Media, allows users to share media such as images and videos with other users in their network as status updates and profile posts.
Chapter 9, Events and Birthdays, integrates a calendar to manage and display events created by our users and birthday notifications.
Chapter 10, Groups, allows users to create and maintain groups related to specific topics with their own lists of members, who opt in to be part of the group.
Chapter 11, Developing an API, discusses the development of an API to allow third-party websites and developers to interact with the social network, so that it can gain popularity through other applications too.
Chapter 12, Deployment, Security, and Maintenance, looks at steps to make the framework more secure and protect it from spam, as well as looking at how to back up the site and restoring it from a backup.
Chapter 13, Marketing, SEO, User Retention, and Monetization Strategies, advises on how to market and promote the social network, and gives useful tips to help develop search engine-friendly websites.
Chapter 14, Planning for Growth, goes through a number of potential issues that will occur when the social network becomes more popular, and advises on scalability, deployment and hosting options, caching, and content delivery networks.
During the course of this book, you will need the following software to try out the various code examples:
Apache 1.3 or above (2 recommended)
mod_rewrite module for Apache
MySQL 5.0 or above
PHP 5.0 or above (5.2 or above recommended)
When working locally on your own computer, a package such as WampServer 2 for Windows is recommended, as this will install PHP, Apache, and MySQL in one, and make enabling extensions easy.
A text editor is all that is required for editing the code. However, one with syntax highlighting would be beneficial (such as Crimson Editor or Notepad++).
For deployment, an FTP application such as FileZilla will be required, and an SSH client such as PuTTY for some of the backup and restoration options would be useful.
This book is primarily aimed at PHP developers, but is suitable for any web developer looking to expand their knowledge and understanding of social networking concepts. Intermediate knowledge of PHP and object-oriented programming is assumed, along with a basic knowledge of MySQL.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "The delegateControl method checks that the delegate controller is within the allowed delegates."
A block of code is set as follows:
/**
* Is the profile valid
* @return bool
*/
public function isValid()
{
return $this->valid;
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<form action="relationship/create/{ID}" method="post">
<select name="relationship_type">
<!-- START relationship_types -->
<option value="{type_id}">{type_name}</option>
<!-- END relationship_types -->
</select>
<input type="submit" name="create" value="Connect with {name}" />
</form>New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Now if we click on the Connect with button on the relationship form, our relationship is created and we are shown a confirmation message".
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