Technika tv driver. Image: Ever thought of building your own social networking website for college, organization or something like Facebook? If yes, then this article is for you.

Install XAMPP for Windows. You will have the option to select an existing folder or create a new folder to save all XAMPP files. Now both the local Apache server with PHP support and MySQL server with phpMyAdmin tool have been set up. We are going to create a MySQL database in the next step.

Even if you know nothing about coding, you can still get your social networking site up and running. In “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric S. Raymond said — “Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).” The above quote means, if there are already tools available to build a social networking website, why will anyone want to start from scratch?

Let’s re-use existing tools, setup your own social network and if you need anything which is not present in it; only then you have to code for it. As of today, there are quite a good number of social networking platforms — commercial, cloud-based and open source. We will see the list of available platforms and will pick the best one for building our own. Best platforms to build social networking site: 1. Elgg is an award-winning social networking engine — completely open source, PHP based and very powerful. Elgg powers networks for a wide range of organizations including Australian Government, British Government, Wiley Publishing, and many more.

It’s a free and open-source social network plugin for Ruby on Rails applications. Just drop it into your new or existing application, and you’ll instantly have all the features of a basic community site. SocialEngine is commercial and very powerful. Available as cloud or self-hosted solution. We will probably not look at this. Commercial but cheaper than SocialEngine. Built from the ground up for social, Ning’s scalable hosted platform gives you the tools and expertise you need to publish and connect with your community.

[updated] Commercial and ready to go social network for your business. It is modular based allowing you to easily plug-in or plug-out a feature with a click on a button. This allows developers to easily develop new and awesome features to further extend your communities capabilities. Okay, enough talk about existing solutions, what we are really interested in is to build our own social networking website and show off to our friends.

So let’s begin – and yes as we said, we will always go with the best one instead confusing users with some sort demo of all. From the above list, Elgg is the one for us. Recommended: Steps to build your social networking website: 1. Setting Up Website Development Environment Since Elgg is a PHP-based social networking platform which uses MySQL as back-end, to get started with it; we need to setup a PHP based development environment on our local system. Once you have built and configure the complete solution and you feel that it’s ready to go live, we will point you to our article on how to make it live on internet.

Follow the following steps to setup your PHP development environment –. • Download and install XAMPP for your platform from.

It has all required component for setting up PHP development environment. • Open XAMPP control panel from start menu and enable Apache and MySql services. XAMPP control panel • Open in your browser. You will see a splash page of XAMPP, select your language and it will open XAMPP web admin panel. XAMPP web Admin panel If you are seeing that page than well done you have setup your development environment. There is one important thing we should never forget to do is to check the security settings.

Click on the security link on the left sidebar of the admin panel. You will see that MySQL has root user but no password and hence showing insecure – xampp security page Let’s secure MySQL by clicking on the link setting up the password for MySQL root user – mysql password setting Once you set the password for MySQL. Restart the MySQL service from XAMPP control panel and come back to the security page. You will see that now it’s secure. Remember the password you have setup because you will need it while installing Elgg.