I have recently started the development of a social networking site for gamers.

The designs for Gameaface – as christened by our client – are complete and signed off ready to be coded.

Building the site on top of a social networking framework makes sense, but which framework to use.

After looking through various frameworks, the two main choices are Elgg and Social Engine. Elgg is open source. Social Engine matches the features that we need better than Elgg.

Initial thoughts of Social Engine are that it is aimed at people who want to set up a site very quickly and with little alteration from the Social Engine defaults. Styling the site is done by creating a theme and changing CSS as required. Making structural changes involves dragging and dropping widgets and components onto pages using the admin control panel which is fine for people who want to make very basic customisations, but doesn’t have the flexibility required for a complete overhaul.  The documentation is seriously lacking and only explains how to use the admin interface to make changes; for example, to add an additional page into the signup process involves a fruitless search through Google (There isn’t much of a community using Social Engine yet).

Aside from that, there are a lot of features to the system and there are plenty of additional components that can be purchased to fill in the gaps.