Forum Software Reviews

SocialEngine is the next generation of software, providing a great base you could extend with many plugins. Powered by the PHP Zend Framework, SocialEngine relies on a modern technology that gives it for free very important technical features like a cache management, ORM, database abstraction, well designed URLs and a protected environment (less chance to find SQL injection, opened restricted pages,... ).

SocialEngine's main goal is to allow its user to recreate their own social network, putting members in a central place and focusing on community features. When installing a standard SocialEngine, you will quickly see some similarities with the Facebook user stream, that lists all link shares, discussions, polls, games and events a member is writing and makes him/her interacting with friends. This is the first pillar of this product, that you could extend with official plugins (between $30 and $40 each) or third-party plugins (developed by the community).

If we had to compare SocialEngine with another software, I think Drupal would be a kind of competitor in the open source world. Note however that it would require much more configuration and tuning work for reaching what SocialEngine provides per default.

We have decided to review SocialEngine with the most common plugins you could find in an advanced forum software, including: a Forum (of course), a Blog, an Album Manager, a Calendar and a Poll module. It's time to detail SocialEngine now!

Zend Framework

Android and iPhone are supported natively with the SocialEngine Mobile Plugin. However, note that most smartphones supporting Web technologies will be capable of browsing a website based on SocialEngine.

SocialEngine - Forum Post Topic

SocialEngine Forum plugin features are quite simple and basic, we can actually think about comparing them to the standard Drupal Forum module: it provides main required things but does not play in the same world than pure players like PhpBB or IPBoard.

Anyway, it's also because we have to see the Forum plugin as an additional component of the standard SocialEngine core product, which provides so many great features too.

SocialEngine - Polls

Polls, Instant Messaging and Calendar are possible through the SocialEngine Polls plugin, Chat / IM plugin and Events plugin. Hence, they are not directly integrated into the forum itself, but as part of user stream. Note that the installation is really convenient, as you just need to download the desired archive files and upload them into your Administration Dashboard.

SocialEngine is really good at providing really well defined friendly URLs. This is particularly great for advanced users that look more at the browser location bar than any breadcrumb navigation item on the page itself.

SocialEngine - Member Stream Updates

SocialEngine provides per default two Payment Gateways for paid subscriptions. This is particularly well done and nice to have that bundled with the software, because we always prefer having an official plugin when we talk about money (no spaces for bugs here). 2Checkout and Paypal are supported.

The user profiles and related features are part of the core module of SocialEngine: you don't need to buy the Forum plugin for allowing your users to publish their personal details on your network.

User Ranks can be customized using the several Member Levels SocialEngine provides. Note that you can create your own if required. In order to make it clearer, SocialEngines also provides a Network feature, which basically allows you per default to define a region in the world where a member will be set, and will limit his/her visibility to this particular region.

Note this geographical organization is not mandatory (if such, all users are part of the same network), or could be tuned to set it to the different layers or sections of your company or community (HR, IT Developers, Clients, Private,...)

SocialEngine Control Panel - Forums Plugin

Moderation could be configured, setting different groups of moderation depending on the category or forum.

SocialEngine Control Panel - Member Levels

SocialEngine Administration Panel is really convenient for administrating members and grant some of them to new groups.

SocialEngine Control Panel - Layout Editor

SocialEngine is not only a forum software with a standard fixed layout but allows the administrator to manage the layout. This could be compared to Drupal Blocks that allows you, as well as SocialEngine engine, to entirely define and customize the layout and the content you are going to display on the different pages of your website (Front, Sign Up, Forum Main Page, Footer, Header,...)

Every additional plugins you would install will provide several new content blocks you can place on your pages, that also support up to 12 different layouts (2 sided-column, no columns, 2-footer layout,...). This feature is really well designed, perfectly usable and just mandatory when you want to tweak your website without putting hands in the code.

The first time I reviewed the SocialEngine Client Showcase, I was actually really surprised it was hard to guess SocialEngine was behind. This is really important to make your website not looking an umpteenth clone of whatever big known website.

SocialEngine Control Panel - Performance and Caching

In terms of Performance and Cache features, SocialEngine is far away after its competitors. It provides support to the main PHP Accelerator (Memcache, APC, Xcache) and could use them within a click. I think the fact it uses Zend Framework definitely adds these kind of features per default and for free, which proves it's important to rely on a framework nowadays.

It's also great to see SocialEngine supporting CDN (Content Delivery Network) natively. Configuring the one you have subscribed for will be the only step to host your web content all over the world, on a cloud infrastructure, increasing the speed time of your website. The famous Amazon's S3 and CloudFront services are supported, but any CDN that uses FTP or SCP can be configured as well.

SocialEngine Control Panel - Import Tools

However, SocialEngine does not presently allow you to migrate the history of a standard forum to its format. However it supports the migration from SocialEngine 3 and from Ning.

SocialEngine Control Panel - Spam and Banning Tools

As part of the SocialEngine core, the forum is very well protected against external threats, and this barrier actually protects all additional tools you would install on top of the core application. You will then have possibilities to ban, blacklist and filter bad words if necessary. Note that CAPTCHA are not enabled per default, which is nice when you start, but don't forget about enabling them after a while (see Settings / Spam & Banning Tools).

SocialEngine Control Panel - Facebook Integration

The integration with Twitter and/or Facebook is just awesome. It's a must-have in the present days, but this is not a feature we find everywhere. SocialEngine implements it the way it should be, and that's really perfect.

Key points and major differences that make SocialEngine unique:

• Single Powerful Platform, relying on big names in the PHP world
• Many Available Extensions, all sharing the same users, layout, theme and ergonomy. Hard to accomplish such kind of integration with different software.

From a global perspective, SocialEngine is an awesome product. It provides a great base, extended with many plugins and features. The idea of regrouping a forum around a social network, and the fact you can administrate by yourself your own network of communities, users, fans,... is such a great alternative against the big names like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

SocialEngine is really well designed, powered by a modern PHP language thanks to the Zend Framework, and the default bundle contains enough features to compete with a basic Facebook. Our main issue would however be that, from a forum software perspective, the Forum plugin lacks some important features, and could be a bit limited if you compare it to major software in this topic. The Forum is good, that's for sure, but look like a bit simplistic, which does not mean bad, but only that you could not expect advanced features included. Actually, you can see it more as a Social Network extended by a Forum than the opposite, which is, after all, nowadays a perfectly suitable alternative to the "Forum as a king of your web architecture".

To conclude, we could definitely consider SocialEngine as THE perfect platform, if you like PHP software, hosting your software on your own server, and do not mind to pay for this product. The review here was however more focused to the forum plugin, that's why we finally conclude to mark SocialEngine with this excellent score, but not a perfect one.