PHP 5 Social Networking Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface
Chapter 1: PHP Social Networking
Chapter 2: Planning and Developing the Core Framework
Chapter 3: Users, Registration, and Authentication
Chapter 4: Friends and Relationships
Chapter 5: Profiles and Statuses
Chapter 6: Status Stream
Chapter 7: Public and Private Messages
Chapter 8: Statuses—Other Media
Chapter 9: Events and Birthdays
Chapter 10: Groups
Chapter 11: Developing an API
Chapter 12: Deployment, Security, and Maintenance
Chapter 13: Marketing, SEO, User Retention, and Monetization Strategies
Chapter 14: Planning for Growth
Index

• Preface

• Chapter 1: PHP Social Networking
  • Introduction to social networks
    • Business logic to social networks
      • Examples: Businesses making use of existing social networks and their own social networks
  • Existing social networks
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • MySpace
    • Twitter
  • Existing social networking software
    • Drupal
    • Elgg
    • Joomla!
    • Hybrid approaches
  • Rolling your own
    • Why roll your own?
      • Easier to update and maintain
      • Licensing
      • Enhance knowledge
      • Provide a service
      • Improve business
      • Improve communication
    • Why use PHP?
    • When to use something else
  • Our site: DinoSpace
  • Feature list
    • Limitations
  • Summary

• Chapter 2: Planning and Developing the Core Framework
  • Designing the framework
    • Patterns—making life easier
      • MVC: Model-View-Controller
      • The Front Controller pattern
      • Registry
      • Folder structure
  • Building the framework
    • Registry
      • The registry object
      • Registry objects
    • Front Controller: single point of access
      • index.php
      • .htaccess
  • Summary

• Chapter 3: Users, Registration, and Authentication
  • Privacy policies
  • Users
    • Our user object
    • Our authentication registry object
      • POST authentication
      • SESSION authentication
    • Structuring the database
  • Registration
    • Standard details
    • Hooking additional fields on
    • Processing the registration
      • Creating the profile
      • Putting it all together: registration constructor
    • CAPTCHA
      • General CAPTCHA
      • reCAPTCHA
    • Where do I sign up?
    • E-mail verification
      • Sending e-mails
      • Sending the e-mail verification e-mail
  • Authentication with our authentication object
    • Logging in
    • Are we logged in?
    • Logging out
    • Remember me
  • Help! I've forgotten!
    • Username
    • Password
      • Let them reset the password
  • Summary

• Chapter 4: Friends and Relationships
  • Inviting friends
    • Manually inviting friends
      • Invitation controller
    • Automatically inviting friends
      • Google Friend Connect
      • Windows Live contacts
      • Yahoo!
      • Gmail contacts
    • Automatically connecting with friends
  • Members
    • Listing users
      • Pagination
      • Paginated members
      • Paginated users by letter
    • Searching for users
  • Custom relationships
    • Relationship types
    • Relationships
  • Adding friends
    • Forming a relationship
      • Relationship model
      • Relationship controller
    • Mutual relationships—accepting or rejecting a request
      • Pending requests
      • Accepting a pending request
      • Rejecting a pending request
  • Listing friends
    • Our friends
    • Their friends
      • Mutual friends
  • Friends in your profile
  • Summary

• Chapter 5: Profiles and Statuses
  • User profiles
    • Extendable profile
    • Profile controller
      • Core shared information
    • Static profile
      • Viewing the profile
      • Relationships—some improvements
      • Editing the profile
  • Statuses
    • Statuses database table
      • Statuses types database table
      • Different types of status
    • Template improvements
    • Listing statuses
      • Templates
      • In action
    • Likes, dislikes, and comments
      • Comments
  • Summary

• Chapter 6: Status Stream
  • What is a status stream?
  • Stream model
    • Building the stream
    • Relationships—get the IDs!
    • Friendly times
    • The rest…
  • Stream controller
    • Generating the stream
    • Comments, likes, and dislikes
      • Comments
      • Likes and dislikes
  • Views
    • Main template
    • Status type templates
  • In action
  • Room for improvement
  • A system stream for administrators
  • Summary

• Chapter 7: Public and Private Messages
  • Public messages
    • Controller
      • Displaying profile messages
      • Displaying the post message box
    • Displaying a confirmation message
    • View
    • In action
  • Private messages
    • Database
    • Message model
    • Messages model
    • Controllers and views
      • Listing messages
      • Reading a message
      • Deleting a message
      • Composing a new message
      • Creating a message template
    • In action
    • Room for improvement?
      • Sent items
      • Replies
      • Group messages
  • Summary

• Chapter 8: Statuses—Other Media
  • Why support other media types?
  • Changes to the view
    • Template
      • jQuery to enhance the user experience
    • View in action
  • Images
    • Database table
    • Model
      • Class, variable, and constructor
      • Processing the image upload
      • Saving the status
  • Video (via YouTube)
    • Database
    • Model
  • Links
    • Database
    • Model
  • Extending the profiles
    • Processing the new status posts
    • Altering our profile status' query
    • Status views
      • Images
      • Video
      • Links
    • In action
      • Images
      • Videos
      • Links
    • Repeat!
  • Summary

• Chapter 9: Events and Birthdays
  • Let's plan
    • Calendars: what do we need to be able to do?
  • Calendar library
    • Generating the month
    • Days in the month
    • Ordered days
    • Previous month
    • Next month
  • Displaying a calendar
    • Generate and output
    • Multiple calendars
    • With events
  • Birthdays
    • Getting relationship IDs
    • Setting up the calendar
    • Getting the birthdays
    • Passing them to the calendar
    • The results
  • Events
    • Event model
    • Events model
    • Attendees, invitations, and RSVPs
      • RSVPs
    • Controller
      • Creating an event
      • Calendar of events
      • Viewing an event
      • Upcoming events
  • Reminders
    • On-site notifications
    • E-mail notifications
    • SMS notifications
  • Summary

• Chapter 10: Groups
  • Some planning
    • Group information
    • Types of groups
    • Ownership
    • Membership
    • Features
  • A group
    • Discussion
      • Database
      • Post
      • Topic
    • The group itself
      • Group table
      • Model
    • Creating a group
      • Controller
      • View
      • Creating a group—in action
    • Viewing a group
      • Membership
      • Controller
      • View
      • In action
    • Discussing within a group
      • Group controller additions
      • View
      • Discussion in action—viewing a topic
    • Joining a group
      • Joining (public) groups
  • Groups
    • Listing groups
      • Group controller addition
      • Template
      • In action
    • My groups
      • Addition to the group's controller
      • Template file
      • In action
  • Summary

• Chapter 11: Developing an API
  • What is an API and why should we create one?
  • APIs in social networks
    • Facebook
    • MySpace
    • OpenSocial
  • Some planning
    • What should it do, and who should be able to do what?
    • How should it work?
      • How could it work?
      • Let's go with REST
      • Further reading
  • Implementation
    • Data format
    • API controller
      • Wait—no models?
      • Authentication
    • Delegating control: API controllers for our features
      • Profile's delegate
  • An Application Framework API
    • One solution: use OpenSocial
  • Consuming
    • POSTing data to our API with cURL
  • Summary

• Chapter 12: Deployment, Security, and Maintenance
  • Deploying the site
    • Choosing a domain name
    • Registering a domain name
      • Popular domain name registrars
    • Signing up with a hosting provider
      • Choosing a web hosting provider
      • Considerations for hosts of social networking websites
      • Popular web hosting providers
    • Setting the nameservers for the domain
    • Creating a database on the hosting account
      • With cPanel hosting control panel
      • With appropriate privileges on phpMyAdmin
    • Exporting our local database
    • Importing our local database to the hosting account
    • Changing some of our database records
    • Changing our database configuration options
    • Uploading the files
    • Testing
  • Automating deployment
  • Security
    • Server Security
      • Software
      • Securing the site with a firewall
      • Shared hosting precautions
    • Passwords
    • Error reporting
    • Directory listings
    • SPAM
  • Maintenance
    • Backing up and restoring your social network
      • With cPanel
      • Using the command line
      • Do they work?
    • Access logs and statistics
  • Summary

• Chapter 13: Marketing, SEO, User Retention, and Monetization Strategies
  • Marketing
    • Online advertising
      • Pay-Per-Click
      • Advertising space
      • Newsletter advertising
    • Newsletters
    • Social marketing
      • Viral marketing campaigns
      • Twitter
      • RSS feeds
  • Search engine optimization
    • On-site SEO
      • Headings
      • Links
      • Up to date, relevant content
      • Page metadata
      • Site speed
      • Search engine goodies—sitemaps and tools
    • Off-site SEO
    • What to look for in an SEO company
  • User retention
    • E-mails for the user's action
    • User feedback
    • Hello there!
  • Monetization options
  • Final tips: web stats
  • Summary

• Chapter 14: Planning for Growth
  • Code performance
    • Code profiling
    • Slow queries
    • Compression
    • Useful tools and resources
  • Server performance
    • Apache
    • MySQL
    • Alternative web servers
  • Scaling
    • VPS Cloud Hosting
    • Additional servers
  • Caching systems
    • Memcached
    • Available caching systems
  • Redundancy
  • Content Delivery Networks
  • Message queues
    • Message queue versus database table
    • What can we queue?
    • Processing queued tasks
  • No SQL
  • Learn from the experts
  • Farm it out
  • Summary

• Index