Yes we (Jon
and I) finally managed to get the SocialFront for Umbraco package up on the
our.umbraco.org site. We also got the SocialFront demo
site up and running as well with the latest code - feel free to
have a look, sign up and see what's what. We'd love to hear your
feedback - good or bad! (You can also download the full
source code on Google code).
Basically what we've released is the bare bones version of
a social networking platform based on the Umbraco
CMS. Anyone with an Umbraco installation can (in theory!)
download the package and install it on their site - and hey presto,
a fully-functioning social networking platform exists on their
website.
Users can sign up, sign in, create blogs, post images, make
friends, post comments, and "like" items on the site. It's basic
just now but we have loads of ideas. If you want to get involved,
please get in touch.
We had hoped to get our package live by the end of our third
development day on Saturday, but seeing as we had zero experience
with the installer, that was always a tall order! Anyway, I won't
go into the details just now, but suffice it to say that we had to
spend a few hours on Monday evening and again yesterday to get the
package working well and get the demo site live. Finally!
One point to make here is how our package reflects on Umbraco.
We've had three full development days, along with maybe a couple of
days here and there of development work in addition to that. In
total, less than ten development days to create a social
networking platform for Umbraco! And that includes a
pluggable provider model, so that the developers among you can
change your providers at will. This says a lot about the
flexibility and ease of development of the Umbraco system.
On the topic of the pluggable providers, this means that if you
would like to use Flickr to store your images instead of using the
Umbraco media section, for example, you would simply need to write
an image provider for Flickr which implements the basic functions
that SocialFront requires, change a setting in the web.config, and
you're done. We'll get a screencast with all of the technical
details in due course.
