CMS evaluation for social site

For those who don't know, CMS stands for Content Management System. It is a system which when installed and configured, can be used for pretty much anything.

My challenge was to see what was out there in hopes of solving a pretty basic problem:

Create a social community for Christian gamers!

Right now the community is surviving with some static pages, a phpBB web-forum and lots of human glue. There are some awesome leaders bringing together over 100 individuals interested in playing online games, delivering and consuming online bible studies as well as having interesting discussions around a myriad of topics. I am also a key leader in this community, which currently is only in the United States with leadership in five different states.

To help me understand the needs of the community, we got together in June of 2009 to talk about our future and direction.

Architectural Layout of GamingByGrace (to-be)

The outcome (after the meeting) was an architectural diagram showing the basic features/user interaction that was desired. If you look closely it basically takes the features currently offered in a site like Facebook, but adds some new options (such as reviews, virtual libraries and the like).

Looking at the inventory of software available in the world (reading articles, looking at some sites we found appealing), I generated a list of software to give some focused time looking at. This look would involve digging into their community of support, configuration capabilities as well as plug-in inventory already in place. If I can simply drag'n drop instead of build all the better.

List of items that I went through and analyzed:

• Xoops (http://www.xoops.org/)
• Boonex Dolphin (http://www.boonex.com/products/dolphin/)
• Joomla (http://www.joomla.org/)
• YACS (http://www.yacs.fr)
• Pligg (http://www.pligg.com)
• Drupal (http://drupal.org/)

Of all these systems, Joomla looked the most promising with the largest visible crowd of developers and supporting documentation/assets. After spending nearly a week on each one, fully installed and configured, we decided against any of them. That means I have a good, long road of coding ahead of myself.

After I decided to code, began talking to PHP developers (since I'm primarily a MS.NET guy), reading blogs and trying out different frameworks. Based on the recommendation of an acquaintance, I've started getting my feet wet with CodeIgniter.

There are other options; of course if money is not an obstacle. There is a great community host called Ning, which has great features and about 90% of what we are looking to accomplish. The catch there is if you want to drop their header/footer and stop supporting them with ads installed, it will cost you about $55 per month.

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