eZ Publish as a Friendster Clone

Author Message

Mark Gilbert

Tuesday 14 December 2004 9:35:15 am

Hi

Recently I was doing research on the top 100 English web sites in the world (see alexa.com). I noticed that a lot of the sites are community sites. One in particular caught my eye.

Friendster.com in 1 year 9 months went from non-existent to #39 out of millions of web sites. They did it without advertising. They now have over 13 million members to their service.

In looking at what they are doing I noticed that <b>MOST</b> of the functionality is already built into eZ Publish. The functionality that eZ already has are: "Users and Profiles", "Picture Gallery", "blogs", "Forum", "Comments about an object", etc. The difference is how they put the whole thing together.

Friendster works off the concept of helping you to connect a friend to a friend to a friend etc. The profiles for each user includes - detailed information about that user, blogs from that user, picture Gallery, comments from other users, and a list of friends (thumbnails from the profiles of your friends). They have a form that you fill in to send an email to a friend to invite them to join. If they join that person is automatically added to your friends.

Friendster has it&#8217;s own internal email program where one user can send email to another user. By doing it only in Friendster people can keep their email address private, yet still communicate with their friends.

They also use the internal email to request to add somebody to your list of friends, or to report somebody that is abusing the service.

While that is the basic functionality, it also includes a few other functions.

<b>My question is - </b>

Is anybody working on extending eZ Publish to provide similar functionality?

Do you have any ideas or input for extending eZ Publish to provide the same sort of functionality?

Björn Dieding@xrow.de

Tuesday 14 December 2004 10:49:50 am

one solution on howto extend

- check on each pageview if a logged in user has new messages
- this could be driven by some template operator and some js
- save all messages to the database ( not inside the content tree for better performance )

It is actually not that hard.

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