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General Discussion

Brandon Jepson
Brandon Jepson
7,018 Points
Posted by Brandon Jepson
Brandon Jepson
7,018 Points

Building a small social network for family members

i would like to build a small social network where statuses, entries, pics, videos can be shared. It will be between 10-15 people max with logins. Basically facebook but for 15 people.
I want to know what would be the easiest platform to use to build this. Would wordpress work? I'm sure Rails would but I haven't learned it yet on Treehouse, however I am familiar with Google App Engine framework and Python (not offered on here). Just wanted to know if anyone had thoughts? Thanks

2 Answers

Ricky Catron
Ricky Catron
13,023 Points
Ricky Catron
Ricky Catron
13,023 Points

If your familar with Python I would reccomend Django. It has a prebuilt users class and would be able to proccess video and pictures easily. It also has some great tutorials including https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/ and http://www.tangowithdjango.com/

Brandon Jepson
Brandon Jepson
7,018 Points
Brandon Jepson
Brandon Jepson
7,018 Points

Thanks! Actually I own all the courses from Coding For Entrepreneurs on Udemy which teach Django so thanks, I think this may be the best way to go.

Ricky Catron
Ricky Catron
13,023 Points
Ricky Catron
Ricky Catron
13,023 Points

I built a simple forum in Django a while back and a friend made it upload files easily so I doubt it will be a big challenege to make a simple social network.

ivomiranda
ivomiranda
30,286 Points
ivomiranda
ivomiranda
30,286 Points

Wordpress has a plugin for building a social network but in my opinion, you shouldn't try to force a framework or a CMS to fit in your project but pick the best framework or CMS (that you are used to) to get your project done.

I really don't understand why there is such an eager to build projects in Ruby on Rails.

People speak wonders about Ruby and say PHP is bad and blabla. But in the middle of the discussion they will speak about Ruby on Rails and not about Ruby. Compare RoR with Laravel then, not a language against a framework of another language.

I was curious about Ruby and RoR but I ran from it as soon as I discovered that it isn't easy neither cheap to deploy.

Most hosts that provide a reasonable quality/cost for smaller projects come with cPanel and cPanel isn't supporting newer versions of RoR.

If your goal is to learn with this project why don't give it a try with pure PHP and a simple framework like medoo.in to handle database manipulation? In my opinion it's a great way to start and to understand why frameworks are so important. For example, there might be a point where you will need a login system and you will do your own (probably a very weak authentication system but at least you know how hard it is to accomplish this task and then when you use a framework to ease this process it will be great that you know what it is doing in theory even if you didn't write this system).

Then you will get to a point where your code will be a bit like spaghetti. Then you will be amazed when you discover why MVC is soooo important! :)

Have fun building your app! :)