Set Up Your Own Social Networking Site

If you want to extend the reach of your brand then social networking sites

like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut etc. have proven to be platforms of choice.

However, if you are having your own website or are planning to have one soon,

then a convenient way would be to install and run social networking software for

your website.  Adding social networking features to your website becomes more

helpful as it provides a platform for users to interact and collaborate. XOOPS

with Yogurt module lets you do all this.

XOOPS, an acronym for eXensible Object Oriented Portal System, is a PHP based

CMS solution that can serve as a web framework for building dynamic community

websites or intra-company portals having features like web logs, news, forums

etc. XOOPS is a well-known Open Source CMS that also allows you to build a

social network through its Yogurt module. For an enterprise, such social

networks can help to form a community of members for the site visitors to

interact with. The Yogurt module of XOOPS has features that allow users to have

a personal album of pictures, videos from You Tube, friends list, a public wall

of messages (scrapbook), and form communities. It also has privacy features

where users can configure who can see what. In this article, we see how to get

started with XOOPS and install the Yogurt module and have an Orkut like social

network where the organization's users can interact and form communities.

Getting started



The prerequisites for installing XOOPS are a web server (Apache or IIS), PHP

5.2 or higher and MySQL 4.1 or higher installed and configured. Also a database

to be used by XOOPS should be created in MySQL. You can name the database as

xoops_db and also create the user and access rights to the database. With this

month's DVD, we have distributed the latest versions of XOOPS and the Yogurt

module. Extract the contents of the zipped files. Now copy the contents of the

htdocs folder to the root document path of your web server. In case of Apache it

would be www folder. Now you can start the installation by typing your company's

URL where you have upload XOOPS contents. If you have used a test environment

then “http://localhost” will be your URL to initiate installation.

When you go to the base URL where you've copied the XOOPS files on web server, the XOOPS installation wizard starts with a list of steps that will be followed during installation.

After doing the configuration check, the wizard checks for directories where XOOPS files are located. Move the xoops_data and xoops_lib files out of the root document folder of the web server.

The wizard checks for database server login details. Here provide the database name you created for XOOPS and the prefix to be used in each table name.

Create the general configuration of your website's page with description and meta tags. Next, install options for private messaging, user profiles and protector modules.

Once the wizard finishes, go to the directory where you extracted Yogurt and copy it to the Modules folder under the root directory of the web server, and restart the web server.

After the web server restarts, click on Administration Menu on home page. This page will show the installed modules, and to add Yogurt module click on modules button.

The Modules Administration page lists the installed modules and those that are available to be installed. Clicking on the install button will install the social networking module.

On home page you can see Social Networking as a new option under Main Menu panel. Clicking on that opens Orkut like interface having all social networking features.