Why build a social network component for Joomla

On August 8th 2013, I received an email regarding a very interesting question, it was why did we take the route to re-invent the wheel since Facebook already exists. My answer to him was fairly simple, why do you even build a site when there are millions of sites that are already out there :)

No, we are not re-inventing the wheel and we do not have plans to re-invent the wheel. Our primary goal for EasySocial is to bring a change to the way social network extensions behave on a Joomla site. We have heard tons of comments from the Joomla community that there isn't any decent social network extension that already exists in the Joomla extension eco-system, and so we decided to develop one after receiving hundreds of requests from the Joomla community.

There were many users also asking to combine our existing Joomla extensions like EasyBog, EasyDiscuss and Komento into one single social networking platform, because they saw that the collective features of these extensions can possibly integrate and work like a social network. We didn't want to build plugins to connect them all, so we thought how about if we build a more solid tool for that purpose instead.

This baby project was initially started almost a year ago when we were playing around and integrating with existing solutions such as JomSocial and Community Builder. We didn't take this seriously because our initial goal was not to compete with any of these extensions. It was just exploring around during our free time. As time went on, more and more users were requesting for a new extension. This is when things got a little serious (too serious maybe :p).

We started building a framework layer that works across all Joomla versions. Slowly, we got the hang of it, and up till now we have made over 9,500 commits. Yep, that's right, 9,500 commits for the first revision of the software is just amazing. The team is extremely enthusiastic about this project and they have given their best in this project. Yes, that's right it's a team effort and not mine alone.

To tease you with some of the awesome stuff that we're working on, I have some screenshots of EasySocial:

We will be releasing a beta of EasySocial very soon! So if you want to test it out, you can sign up for the mailing list at http://stackideas.com/easysocial

Thank you once again for your continuous support!