Thanks for the detailed email below Balchandar. Appreciate your initiative
in this.
I fully agree with you on the "high development efforts/time/knowledge"
issue which has been delaying a new, more optimal site for our club for too
long now. In the future this will always delay new changes and restrict more
members from contributing to the online infrastructure.
I really like and agree with the Navigation structure you proposed (attached
JPG in your email). It's very comprehensive for new users to find their way
around.
I am trying hard to find some free time to objectively evaluate both
Taranum's Joomla/phpBB-based and your Ning-based prototype sites in order to
compare and feel the pros and cons of each (and consider
differences/migration from the current blog/group infrastructure set up by
myself).
Meanwhile, please keep this discussion active + I pray to God almighty that
one of our organizers or CTCOnline ("volunteers" for online infrastructure)
will spend some time evaluating both proposals so we can migrate soon.
Once we are confident about a good solution I will fully support the
transition from the current infrastructure. Key dependency however is to get
some supporting volunteers to evaluate + migrate.
Peter.
From: Balachandar [mailto:becha...@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 11:20 PM
To: 'Tarannum Abbasi'; 'Diwakar Viswanathan'; 'Peter Van Geit';
ctconline@googlegroups.com; organiz...@chennaitrekkers.org
Subject: RE: Social networking sites will get better with Ning
Hi Diwakar / Tarun.
Thanks for the comments. Before we get into this, let me share a few things.
Does CTC need a Social Networking site?
Social Networks are of two types. One is 'People centric' networks, like
orkut, facebook and Myspace. The next one is 'Object Centric' Networks,
where people get connected on a common objective or they share similar
interests, like FlickR, LinkedIn etc. CTC will fall in the second one as we
are a group of people with a common interest, Trekking. So its all about how
we define a 'Social Network'.
Open Source and Joomla
I myself is a opensource fanboy and I've played with Joomla and Drupal for
the last few years. My recent work on Joomla is this
<http://www.tatanano.com/> . So I understand the development effort, open
source and community advantages. I wasn't aware that there's some Joomla
work going on when I first emailed Peter. My initial proposal of Ning was
against the blogspot site that's live now. If someone's doing something with
Joomla its good enough to go with that.
Why Ning?
But compared to Joomla and Ning, I'm still with Ning for the following
reasons.
1. Ning is extremely instantaneous and usable. It allows even the most
novice of web users to create and maintain their own highly customized
social network in moments. Joomla needs some developer to set it up and
maintain.
2. The code base lies on the extremely robust scalable Ning servers
and every new feature is available to us over the night. Features I meant
here is some of the best of the breed new internet trends like facebook
integration or flickR integration or PHP6 or anything new that's gonna
come. Again, Im sure Joomla's community will come with new modules for the
same, but still it needs some developer effort to upload it to the servers
and get it working.
3. If theres a new version of Joomla, it's an another
installation/setup effort by a developer. Keeping an old code in the server
will make the web host company to treat it as a security threat and will
force you to upgrade. (Attached email for proof)
4. Ning is free with google ads and ning subdomain name. The minimum
cost would be the 60$/year to map the domain name. Again, Joomla needs a
server to host and a decent server will cost you 100$/year on an average. I
understand you get servers for 15$ an year, but im talking about a reliable
one.
5. No more email chains. Ning allows you to manage your communications
at multiple levels and via multiple channels. Members can subscribe to
either email alerts or RSS feeds at diff levels. Joomla is capable of this
with some amount of customization, but quite not intuitive as how ning does.
6. Yes. Ning has a bandwidth limit. But it's not a serious problem.
Members will obviously use Picasa, FlickR and youtube to upload pictures and
will use the embed code or links. Moreover Ning has direct API integration
to import flickR photos.
7. Ning supports viral marketing, in another words it's about getting
more members. Its highly usable and intuitive user interface makes it a
cakewalk for novice web users. In joomla, it highly depends on the theme and
the amount of time that you spend on customizing it.
8. Yes. Joomla is enterprise grade, but it needs a lot of development
effort and people dependency on maintaining it. Ning needs an average of 15
- 30 mins time to get it up and running.
9. Though Ning is hosted, it supports customized code changes to a
larger extent. Link
<http://developer.ning.com/notes/Accessing_Source_Code_with_SFTP> here
That said, I wanted to clarify that I don't have any personal benefits in
selling Ning. I'm more interested in taking this development effort forward
without the dependency of Me or Diwakar or Tarunnum. We have to eventually
avoid conversations like 'I got too busy with my work and other personal
works too, so couldn't devote any time to work on the site. Once I get
sometime I work around the site and try to bring it a full site.'. No
personal offence meant here. Our work nature doesn't supports these kinda
things as we plan.
Joomla is powerful than Ning in many ways. Agreed, but it has developer
dependency. I seriously appreciate the development efforts that has been
done so far by Diwakar and Tarannum. Im eagerly waiting to see the site to
go live. Im not going to justify Ning anymore. It's all about user
experience and I personally feel Ning will do justice here. The Chennai
trekkers Ning site can be deleted at any point of time.
Attached image is the Navigation structure that I planned for Chennai
Trekkers Ning site, and its for your reference if its of any help.
Cheers
Balachandar.
From: Tarannum Abbasi [mailto:tan...@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 7:53 PM
To: Balachandar; Diwakar Viswanathan; Peter Van Geit;
ctconline@googlegroups.com; organiz...@chennaitrekkers.org
Subject: RE: Social networking sites will get better with Ning
I must agree with Diwakar here.
Before we start setting up Ning, we must first answer the question: Do we
need a Social Networking site?
Also, is CTC-spam-emails-management the only issue for which we are looking
for alternatives? What exactly are we looking for?
A few points:
* A social networking site is going to shut out the general public from who
and what CTC is. One has to join to know more. As is with the groups.
* A web-site will allow a casual surfer to know more about the club, get
info on how we work etc. and then decide whether to join or not. This may
filter out the riff-raffs.
Peter, Diwakar FYI : Google Analytics can be integrated into Joomla.
Tarannum
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