A Social Network Management System (SMS) is a more evolved version of a Content Management System (CMS) where registered users are able to communicate with each other, become mutual friends (or contacts), and all together participate in generating content.

The context and quality of User Generated Content (UGC) is often influenced by active collaboration of the online community members in organically formed groups and their passive observation of each other's online activities.

User Profile Manager

The User Profile Manager is the back-bone of the SMS framework and it is used for registering and maintaining the list of user profiles and their friends (or contacts). In addition to that, a set of extensions and applications are in place to facilitate communication, collaboration, and content creation. A few examples of these applications are:

• Discussion Forums and Groups
• Private Messaging (PM)
• Discussion Walls
• User Media Galleries ( Audio, Video, Image )
  
• Blogs
  
• Content Feeds for independent Personal blogs, and outside media management services such as YouTube or Flickr
• Payment Processors
• Commenting and Ranking Systems
• Tagging ( or Folksonomy )
  
• Community Policing Tools
  

A Minimalist approach to User Profile Management

Unlike some bloated user profile managers on social networking websites, we have decided to include only the most basic information that a user profile needs such as Credentials (Username, password, email), and Address ( for Geo-mapping and credit card processing purposes ).

That means extended user profile information ( Education, Interests, Work Experience, ... ) are handled by adding additional custom extensions and components. This approach increases the modularity and flexibility of the system, especially when we are going to develop a customized solution for a client. The user profile manager utilizes AJAX technologies in many instances such as the user profile search and edit screens.

Friend or Foe Manager

Members of the social network can search and add other members as friends (or contacts). They can also block unwanted members from their profiles.

Rules of Friendship and Reciprocity

Members have the option to ignore or accept friendship requests from other community members.

• If member A adds member B as a contact therefore Member A is a Fan of member B.
• If member B reciprocates and add member A as a contact too, then they are considered to be Friends.
• If member A blocks member B, then member B has no access to the member A profile and any of their private information.

Do more with a Social Network Management System

Additional features such as Forums, Groups, Private Messaging (PM), Ranking System, Content Feed Manager, Payment Processors  and so on ... are added as modules and extensions to a basic Social Network framework to facilitate communication, collaboration, and content creation.

Every Social Network has a slightly different focus and business model, therefore the arrangement and configuration of all of these extensions are uniqute to a client's business model. That is exactly when we come to help our clients to build their ideal community based business website. 

Technical Information

Our framework of choice is Joomla! CMS due to it's ability to provide both CMS and a solid software development framework, however depending on what a client's needs are, we might choose to deliver a social engine powered website using either Wordpress , Drupal or Ruby on Rails technologies.