We have now launched one of our most ambitious projects to date for the theatre group Magnetic North.
They approached us with an exciting project to refurbish their existing site but also to create a new site for a project they would be running called Open Source. The idea of Open Source would be to allow anybody interested in theatre to become more intricatly involved in the creation of a production and see how the project evolves from start to finish. In order to do this the client wanted to create a social networking site along the lines of a simplified Facebook which would allow people to join the project, create a profile for themselves, and participate in group discussions.
In order to fulfill this brief we were originally going to use Ning to create the site, however we decided that this would be too limiting in terms of expanding the site and having more explicit control over the functionality of the site as well as being rather expensive. We therefore decided instead to use Joomla 1.5 with the JomSocial community component.
By building the site with Joomla 1.5 it also enabled us to create two unique templates for the site, one for Magnetic North itself and one for the Open Source project but still allowing for all content to be edited from a single administration panel. As well as the core social networking system we also added in the Eventlist events component (to allow them to easily add upcoming tour dates and other events), Kunena Forum (to allow users to freely discuss whatever issues they wanted in a more open environment) and MyBlog, one of the more popular native Joomla blogging components.
We ensured, both through design and configuration, that all of the site’s features were tightly integrated with one another so that the site’s main activity feed would reflect new blog posts, group activities, image uploads, event registrations and more.
Are you interested in getting your very own private social networking site set up? Or do you think that your existing site could benefit from having such a system? More and more web users are taking part in social networking now and it is becoming a vital way for getting people involved in your website - contact us for more information on how something like this might be of benefit to you.
