Anahita Project looks very promising from the screen shots. But seeing as it is still in alpha, and code is only available to partners, i cannot test it out. However it does look professional and seems to be written by a solid team.

Elgg. This is an excellent product as far as it goes. However I found it to be too user-centric for the use I have in mind. their groups plugin is very mediocre. It is not a group at all, rather just a forum. It has a great pages and files repository function, but these are all related to the user and not to a group. oh well.

BuddyPress. This seems to have the most elegant user interface of the bunch, but it might be a matter of taste. buddypress is built on top of WordPress MU as well it integrates bbPress for forums. The user community is quite active with new plugins coming all the time. However the project is still young.

Social Engine. While this is paid software, the price is reasonable. It has many plugins, all mature looking, such as chat, groups, events, video and audio. However I could not see a way to get forum or group posts to get sent to email. (but maybe it exisits). The site design and layout seemed a bit dated to me.

I’m leaning towards BuddyPress because I like the way it looks as well as I have experience with WPMU.

My two recommendations are…

Anahita social engine – nooki framework which is a version of the zend framework, looks very promising, GPL expected december 09….runs as a joomla plugin.
Open source.

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Social engine V4 – zend framework, public beta due early dec 09. $250.

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From the list above i have used, boonex dolphin 6.14, elgg, phpizabi, social engine…and not on the list phpfox.

i can safely say dont bother touching phpizabi its old news and dead in the water.

Elgg would be great for an intranet network as sef urls dont exist.
if you install mods, pls only use the trusted mods, or mods that have been approved, and are finished.

Boonex have done a huge amount of work over the last year on D7, so definatley worth looking into, however i gave up on 6.14 due to messy structure and noobs pretending to be experts within the community.

phpfox…yeh its ok, however i found the interface boring and still do with the new V2, and the forum has its fair share of ego bashing – non programmers who know it all.

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so your wondering what im using for my niche community?

social engine as its flexible with good privacy controls and the best reliable plugin creators around, and the new V4 is promising to be a good scalable platform.

http://www.socialengine.net

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and for a different future project il be exploring Anahita social engine.

http://www.anahitapolis.com/

info@uniquelogics.com

Free and open-source, mature, stable, widely used, 180+ extensions (100+ open-source and free) for it:
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/popular
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/extension-specific/community-builder-extensions

I started with ELGG and now tried Buddypress.
Elgg seems for me a little bit tricky, but Buddypress is on the other hand only a plugin and therefore dependent on the further development of Wordpress.

ELGG is more privacy-based. That means, that only registered users can view the profiles etc. Buddypress’ profiles are in principle viewable for every visitor of the social network.

Sorry … over a thousand hours

Thank you so much for mentioning the Anahita project. Since then we have won serveral new partners who have contributed to our project financially and are planning to develop their next Social Web project using this framework. We can’t wait to have the codebase ready and make it available to the public since Anahita offers modularity and scalaibity that many other simiarl projects in this category don’t such as: a true MVC framework, Open Social design philosophy, abiltiy to run social apps, API to develop social apps and extensions, a state of the art template engine, ability to overwrite everything from the html to requests, classes and the libraries and it is released under the GPL license.

Anahita is very much focused on building Social Websites and not just social networks and facebook clones!

Anahita is a commercial open source project. We need to fund the thousands of hours of work that we have put into this project and make sure that project moves forward strongly, so we have considered several business modesl behind it and the project has already been financially successful.

Those who are interested can view this presentation from the Vancouver DemoCamp 07. We presented in the same day with BuddyPress, another great project that we’ve gotten many inspirations from

http://blog.anahitapolis.com/2009/07/presenting-anahita-social-engine-at-vancouver-democamp-7/

and here is the Interview with the Nooku TV
http://blog.anahitapolis.com/2009/06/anahita-social-engine-with-joomla-from-nooku-tv/

http://pinaxproject.com/