Many criticize social networks for intruding into one’s personal life. However, the fact that it has redefined the way people interact with each other cannot be ignored either. People love to know new people and with the success of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, you’ll see a new social networking site pop out every other day. Without a doubt, money is there!
If you are a developer who is looking to build a social networking site, you should build a solid foundation first. This ensures that your project keeps running smoothly all the time. That’s why you need PHP.
Importance of PHP
When you are going to code for a new website, you generally look for a solution that’s easily manageable and reusable. PHP provides you with exactly that. Developers can easily build a website through PHP by putting together some robust set of codes.
Easy Framework
PHP is not tough to understand and if you have a background in programing, it should not become a cumbersome task to manage PHP codes. More importantly, it is open source, so, its get easier for a developer to try his hands on PHP.
More user friendly
PHP helps you to create dynamic websites and that’s exactly what a regular user wants from a social networking site. For example, they don’t want to wait till hitting submit to see that the username is already taken, they want an error message to be displayed right after moving the mouse cursor away. It’s more about making the social networking site more user-friendly.
Extensible
With social networking sites, it’s important to keep adding new features or modules to keep the user interest growing. PHP is highly extensible and adding new modules to an existing PHP code without harming the old code should be a cakewalk.
It’s extremely important to implement private messaging system, web chat functionality, member management system etc. in a social networking site. If you are an experienced PHP developer, these functionalities should not take more than an hour to be included in your social networking site.
Cross Platform
PHP websites run seamlessly on all of the major operating systems. This is important as you won’t know which operating system is being used by your users, right? In addition, PHP is compatible with Apache and IIS servers.
Not to mention, PHP websites load extremely fast and you will also find numerous hosting providers with PHP pre-installed. Make sure to use one that uses PHP 4.2 or higher as the older versions may not be compatible with all the open source coding available online already.
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