PHP 5 social networking : create a powerful and dynamic social networking website in PHP by building a flexible framework / Michael Peacock.

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Social Networking has quickly become a very popular activity on the Internet, particularly with the emergence of sites like Facebook and MySpace. PHP is a flexible web development language used on a wide variety of sites, including Facebook and Yahoo! But building a social networking site from scratch using PHP involves some complex logic, and also some serious coding. This book will demonstrate how to create, maintain, and extend a powerful social network site. It shows how to create your own flexible social networking framework, allowing users to sign up, customize their profile, befriend other users, share information, communicate, interact with one another, and much more. Taking best practices, such as object-oriented programming, and the Model-View-Controller architecture, this book will begin by walking through the development of a simple development framework, which is then used to rapidly build a Social Networking platform, building upon the social features chapter by chapter. At the end of this book, you will have a powerful Social Networking platform loaded with many features which can take the user from signing up and connecting with other users to posting and sharing information. With an API in place, the platform can be extended and used by other Social Networks. This book doesn_t just stop with the code and the logic behind it; useful supplementary information is also covered, such as marketing the Social Network, keeping Search Engine Optimization in mind when developing, backing up and maintaining the site, and how to deal with large amounts of traffic through scaling. By the end of this book, you will be left fully prepared to build, manage, maintain, and extend a powerful Social Network for your business, hobby, organization, family, and clients. A fast-paced guide to creating a flexible Social Networking website using PHP with a custom, light weight MVC framework.

Cover; Copyright; Credits; About the Author; Acknowledgement; About the Reviewers; Table of Contents; Preface; Chapter 1: PHP Social Networking; Introduction to social networks; Business logic to social networks; Examples: businesses making use of existing social networks and their own social networks; Existing social networks; Facebook; LinkedIn; MySpace; Twitter; Existing social networking software; Drupal; Elgg; Joomla!; Hybrid approaches; Rolling your own; Why roll your own?; Easier to update and maintain; Licensing; Enhance knowledge; Provide a service; Improve business

Improve communicationWhy use PHP?; When to use something else; Our site: DinoSpace; Feature list; Limitations; Summary; Chapter 2: Planning and Developing the Core Framework; Designing the framework; Patterns-making life easier; MVC: Model-View-Controller; The Front Controller pattern; Registry; Folder structure; Building the framework; Registry; The registry object; Registry objects; Front Controller: single point of access; Index.php; .htaccess; Summary; Chapter 3: Users, Registration, and Authentication; Privacy policies; Users; Our user object; Our authentication registry object

POST authenticationSESSION authentication; Structuring the database; Registration; Standard details; Hooking additional fields on; Processing the registration; Create the profile; Putting it all together: registration constructor; CAPTCHA; General CAPTCHA; reCAPTCHA; Where do I sign up?; E-mail verification; Sending e-mails; Sending the e-mail verification e-mail; Authentication with our authentication object; Logging in; Are we logged in?; Logging out; Remember me; Help! I've forgotten!; Username; Password; Let them reset the password; Summary; Chapter 4: Friends and Relationships

Inviting friendsManually inviting friends; Invitation controller; Automatically inviting friends; Google Friend Connect; Windows Live contacts; Yahoo!; Gmail contacts; Automatically connecting with friends; Members; Listing users; Pagination; Paginated members; Paginated users by letter; Searching for users; Custom relationships; Relationship types; Relationships; Adding friends; Forming a relationship; Relationship model; Relationship controller; Mutual relationships-accepting or rejecting a request; Pending requests; Accepting a pending request; Rejecting a pending request; Listing friends

Our friendsTheir friends; Mutual friends; Friends in your profile; Summary; Chapter 5: Profiles and Statuses; User profiles; Extendable profile; Profile controller; Core shared information; Static profile; Viewing the profile; Relationships-some improvements; Editing the profile; Statuses; Statuses database table; Statuses types database table; Different types of status; Template improvements; Listing statuses; Templates; In action; Likes, dislikes, and comments; Comments; Summary; Chapter 6: Status Stream; What is a status stream?; Stream model; Building the stream

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