is PHP the best for social networking sites? I am asking this as I want to start my own social networking site. Can someone please guide me?
Yeah.. PHP is always cool. Already there are quite a few social networking scripts available. SocialEngine is better among paid options. I'd rather suggest you go with BuddyPress plugin with WordPress. Its free and the community is always there to help you out. BuddyPress has improved a lot since its 1.5 release. As WordPress is so flexible you can tweak to make it custom via plugins
Social engine is good one BuddyPress is good as well, but according to me it's take too much time to load web pages. I know setup of Social Engine And It's plugins .. If you want to setup it, Pm Me.
I've had hands on experience with both SocialEngine and BuddyPress, PM me if you'd like to work with me.
yea you can start with social engine or maybe PHPFox that was a good script to start social networking site
There is this thing called Diaspora. It's open source and it is essentially like many other social network sites you see around. But it has one major difference: it's a distributed social network. Check this out for its source code: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora The tutorials, and everything you need are there.
There are only a few good social network scripts around. Actually 3 well known and solid. phpFox - http://www.phpfox.com (the best of the 3) Social Engine - http://www.socialengine.net Jomsocial - http://www.jomsocial.com (this one is a Joomla component)
DataEngine look's like a great platform to start off with, you can hire a freelancer to design you a great theme/skin and you could work off that.
I've tried buddypress and dolphin for my social network for artists... At the end I decided to develop my own PHP engine for my network because of the specific needs. Turned out I could finish quicker by developing from zero than adjusting an existing, pre-made engine.... If you're interested in my PHP engine for social network, PM me.