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Ask HN: Framework for social community

3 points by Feeble ↗ HN
Hi. I am currently looking at building a community site around an online game. The game is very well suited for a community and they would most certainly complement each other. The community site would be your basic register, chat, friends etc. Nothing too exotic. It would be nice though to incorporate some dynamic behavior through Ajax/Comet/JQuery etc.

My question is: What would you recommend in terms of language/framework to build an online community site?

At this state I am pretty much open to any language/framework. My approach is to go as lean as possible, releasing very early and try to adjust the site from what we learn once we go live. I have looked at frameworks such as Django/Wicket/RoR, but also at pure CMS solutions such as Drupal/Joomla.

Any and all suggestions are welcome!

8 comments

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steerpike
Django has pinax http://pinaxproject.com/ which I've had a quick look at in the past and seems quite cool and practical.
Feeble
Yeah, I have looked at Pinax and it looks really nice. However, my concerns are that it looks still a bit in development and that the community is still small. I would love feedback from someone who has actually used it to build something like a community site...
chaosprophet
Rather than build a new site up from scratch, why don't you just create a group on facebook or something??? Most of your users will probably be on facebook, and this would also save you a lot of time.
Feeble
We will not be able to provide the functionality this way. We pretty much need to build a new site from scratch... It is not a bad suggestion though and we will certainly integrate with Facebook in some manner.
chaosprophet
In that case you might also want to consider having a way such that when your users get an achievement or something in the game, their profile on the site gets automatically updated. Then, they could publish these achievements to their Facebook or Twitter streams. This will increase the virality of your game.
Feeble
That is definitely on the road map, however, right now I am just trying to find a good technology stack =)