: I am looking for a script where users can create groups cms/social interaction site I am trying to find a Content Mangement/social interaction script that requires a person to be a part of

@Shanna517

There's very little need for most people/businesses to hire a developer to develop a new application/CMS from the ground up for them, so hiring a developer to write a plugin/extension for an existing platform is definitely a good approach. You could also use a CMS framework like Drupal, which is frequently used to create community/corporate portals. OpenAtrium in particular is a popular team portal package that comes with:


multiple groups with private membership
group-based calendars (a calendar for each squad)
group-based project management (so group leaders can assign tasks to specific members and set deadlines for projects)
group-based notebooks - These are wikis that can be organized into different notebooks and edited by anyone. They're pretty flexible and a very powerful collaboration and knowledge management tool. However, by default OA's notebook editor is pretty basic. You can create paragraphs and attach images and other files or link to other pages without any coding knowledge. But to embed inline images and links, you basically need to know HTML. However, you might be able to integrate some kind of WYSIWYG editor into it.
group shoutbox - this is like a twitter feed that anyone in the group can post to
group blogs - everyone posts to a single blog, and the comment area for each blog post can host threaded discussions.
group-based message board - this has to be separately enabled, and, again, there's not a very good editor for it, so you're mostly limited to text-only messages unless you use some sort of plugin.
e-mail notifications when a notebook page is changed, a messageboard post or blog comment is added, etc.


Luckily, Drupal and OA are both fairly popular, so there should be a lot of plugins available for them. Each group can also have their own theme, I believe. However, it probably requires significant coding to customize the themes.

TWiki is another open source groupware/enterprise portal platform that is very popular and has similar functionality.

You can also use multiple applications and simply have them share a single user table so that each member only needs to remember one set of usernames and passwords.

On the other hands, Google Groups and Yahoo! Groups are quite good at what they do. They can't be customized as much (though they're easier to make cosmetic changes to, like changing background colors, adding logos, etc. without any programming knowledge), but they provide most of the functionality a club-type organization needs in a website:


a group discussion board/mailing list
a group calendar
group file/document/image sharing

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@Kevin317

You can put this together with Drupal for the core CMS functions, and specifically the Organic Groups module for what you're describing as far as the various squads, etc. This is what the Drupal organization itself uses for its own groups sub-site. (If you scroll down a bit there, you'll see some have open membership, others are invitation-only, and others also go through a request process.)

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@Turnbaugh106

The are quite a few DIY social network scripts out there. Hotscripts has 114 free or paid for ones available.

MooSocial (From 9), and Friendika(free) are fairly representative of whats available in terms of facebook clones.

Twitter like microbloggers are also available, and most are simple to set up for a small group of people like yours (many are designed for exactly this purpose).

As others have pointed out setting something like this up in Drupal or Wordpress is possible and may provide greater flexibility for development, but if you're not hugely technical or time poor, then these might be overkill compared to a dedicated supported script which will come with feature updates to match facebook over time.

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