Member Avatar for micho

hello....

i am new here. this looks like a site with great content. great job.

i have one question. i am looking into creating an online community/social network. does anyone know of any that i may purchase [w/ source code]? no reason to re-invent the wheel i guess. i just want to browse the scene and look for some quality products. if they do not exist, then i will go at it myself. i did a generic search in google/yahoo.... results were lame.

let me know if you get a chance...thanks :)
-michel

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Dani AI

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asked for purchasable social‑network software with source code (profiles, galleries, blogs, friends). Earlier replies pointed to forum/CMS approaches from , , , and . Below is a compact, practical buying + evaluation guide and a few representative engines that provide source access or are self‑hosted.

Open‑source engines (full source, self‑hosted) that cover profiles, groups, activity streams and media include BuddyPress (WordPress plugin), Elgg, and HumHub — all are designed to be extended and self‑hosted. (buddypress.org)

Commercial/licensed platforms that sell turnkey social stacks and paid support (often with downloadable code or source‑access options) include SocialEngine and phpFox — good for faster launches but check license and support terms carefully. (socialengine.com)

When evaluating any package, use a short checklist:

  • Required features matched versus out‑of‑the‑box (profiles, galleries, blogs/forums, friends/follows, privacy controls)
  • Licensing and source access: GPL vs proprietary; redistribution and modification rights
  • Extensibility and plugin ecosystem; quality of developer docs
  • Maintenance: recent release cadence and security patch history
  • Mobile: responsive UI and native app strategy
  • Scalability and media handling: CDN, object storage, caching, background jobs
  • Moderation, spam controls and legal/data‑privacy requirements (GDPR/CCPA)
  • Total cost of ownership: license, hosting, custom development, ongoing updates

For many standard community sites it is faster and safer to customize an existing engine and plan for moderation, backups and security audits. Custom builds make sense only when the product must do something genuinely different at scale.

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Member Avatar for floris

I suggest vBulletin forum software @ vBulletin.com

Member Avatar for micho

thank you for replying....

i should have been more specific....

when i mean by online community/social network, i imagine.....

user profiles that include image galleries, blogs, forums, friends list...etc.etc..

thanks!

Member Avatar for pulse

thank you for replying....

i should have been more specific....

when i mean by online community/social network, i imagine.....

user profiles that include image galleries, blogs, forums, friends list...etc.etc..

thanks!

As such there is hardly any out of box social networking software that exists but I had once gotten vBulletin to mimmick nearly every feature at MySpace. With the hacks available at vBulletin.org, you can pretty much do anything with vB that you want. :)

Member Avatar for dorien

Use the openSource Drupal framework. I've written a book on how to create a social network with Drupal, you can download it at: SNIP

The result of the ebook is a site like SNIP

Good luck!

Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

Check out Joomla.

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