Eli the Computer Guy

I can’t say enough about how thankful I am that I am using PHPFox for my Social Networking Site.  A few years ago one of my employees built a very complex social networking site for a client of mine using PHPFox.  It worked great, and had every function the client needed.  When it came to building my Online Community a little over a month ago I was grateful to see PHPFox was still around.

PHPFox is a very sophisticated platform you can just buy “off the shelf”, and deploy exceedingly easily.  I bought it for $300, uploaded the files to a dedicated server I am leasing, and within 45 minutes was accepting beta testers. In FORTY FIVE minutes I went from giving PHPFox my credit card number, to accepting Beta Testers.  Although I had used the platform almost 5 years ago now, I hadn’t touched it since.  It was so easy to setup that it was literally running and accepting members in less then an hour.  Over the past month and a half I have had to learn more about the back end functionality, and have had to make some administrative changes, but I honestly can’t believe I’ve put more then 3 hours of real administration into the site.  It has been running along very well, and now has almost 1200 members.

I chose PHPFox over other solutions for a number of reasons.  First and foremost I chose it because they offer REAL support.  As a technology business person I know how valuable it is to be able to contact someone if your site crashes.  As a computer guy I will try to maintain the site myself, and I don’t want to spend money on someone doing basic maintenance, but it’s nice to know that if I run into a real problem I can give someone my credit card number and know it will be fixed.

Beyond that PHPFox has an active developer community that has a number of modules and plugins already available, and if you need something special created they can build it for you.

Once you have PHPFox up and running you get a complete Social Networking Site.  At the end of the day PHPFox is basically a clone of Facebook.  You can create Forums, “Friend” other members, Chat, create Events, Create “Pages” for Groups or Companies, and a lot more.  Generally the front end is easy to use and intuitive for new members who join your Community.  On the back end PHPFox allows for a lot of control.  It has a built in Advertising Module, allows you to ban Members by name, email address or IP Address and has a surprising amount of logging built in.  The only “difficult” section I have found is trying to create and modify Menus.  The Menu administration can get to a bit frustrating and not as simple as it seems it should be.

After running PHPFox for around a month and a half I have found the only additional module I have wanted is CometChat.  With the high end version of CometChat my members can now do Voice and Video Chat, share desktops/ files and more.  It was a $500 but was worth every dime.  So now I have a very powerful site that easily supports thousands of users for $800 and the cost of my dedicated server.  I honestly can’t ask for much more and am happy that PHPFox is still around and seems to be doing well.

My only “warning” is that I would not put PHPFox on a Shared Hosting Plan.  It may “work”, but I can’t imagine it will work well under any kind of real world load.

You can check out my community built with PHPFox here:  http://www.ETCGCommunity.com

And you can look at PHPFox here: http://phpfox.com/

Eli the Computer Guy (429 Posts)

Eli the Computer Guy has 16 years experience in technology being the guy to fix "it". From the Army, to building out new satellite offices for the enterprise, to running his own shop with 9 full time employees Eli has real world experience with almost all systems that technicians will be working with. Eli has 1600 hours of formal technical beyond his Bachelors Degree in Criminal Justice on technologies ranging from Avaya PBX/ Audix to Microsoft, Red Hat Linux, MySQL, Cisco and much more.