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How was this site built?
kurt
Posts: 361
Joined: 10 May 11
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22 Mar 14 11:05 pm

How was this site built?

How do you know how a website was built? I want to know how this site was built: http://www.powerfulintentions.org/
Did they use Wordpress or something else? How can you tell?

I want to create a site like this in a different niche. I like how their members can upload a pic of themselves if they want to and you can see the pic next to their posts in the forum. Affiliorama's forum allows member's pics too, so I would also like to know how affiorama was created - wordpress or something else?

But on that powerfulintentions website you can also search the members - I like that feature. I also like the fact that you can see them right on the home page to the left there. And I like how there's a place for videos and blog posts. And how they got ads on the side. Also, right there on the home page, you can scroll down and see the latest forum posts and latest activity on the site. I love this site, it would be perfect for what I want to do. If anybody knows of any other sites like that one, let me know.

Also, I've been doing some research on how to add a forum to your site. It looks very easy to do. But, it sounds like people use either phpbb or smf. But, like I said, I specifically want a forum like the one I mentioned. And affiliorama's forum isn't bad either. So, would I use phpbb or smf or what? I thought that might depend on how the site was created, so that's why I asked both these questions together.

Thanks
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liam.h.cunningham
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23 Mar 14 1:59 am

 Looking at the source code, this site seems top be using a product called ning (www.ning.com). Not really familiar with it,
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kurt
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23 Mar 14 4:46 am

 Well that figures. Whatever ning is, they charge you monthly for it. I wonder if there are other ways of doing a site like that.

How did you know what to look for in the source code? When I look at the source code for Affiliorama, in one place it says "cdn.optimizely.com", so does that mean optimizely.com was used in the making of affiliorama? In another place it says something about prosilver template for the forum. Wish I understood all that crap, and what to look for.
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liam.h.cunningham
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23 Mar 14 9:35 am

 To understand the code, you need a bit of a background in html and some understanding of javascript. There are many sites that can help there. When I looked at the page, I saw a a reference to api.ning.com in the the javascript portion. The use of the name api is telling. It's and acronym for Application Programming Interface. The page also seems to be importing css pages from ning.
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tankctrlr
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23 Mar 14 9:51 am

 There are a few things you can do to find out what a site's "guts" are made out of, one is to contact the website owner/developer to ask them, sometimes you can find who they used in the footers or about pages etc. Most website owners love to refer people to who they hired to build their sites.

For Ning, yeah that's a well know social-network platform, you can either build your own from scratch or go with services/software like that (Ning), it's a shortcut that in my opinion is well worth it as an investment, now knowing what it takes to get something built from scratch by hiring developers and working with them until completion AND when stuff goes wrong.

Also about this forum (Affilorama), I think I remember way back someone from the dev team saying that it is mostly a custom built platform. If you look in the source code most times you can find what it's made of if you can't figure it out then it's probably custom made.
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kurt
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23 Mar 14 5:53 pm

 Yeah, I did a little more research, and it sounds like from what I read that Ning is indeed a popular social-network platform. In fact, it sounds like it might very well be the best one out there. I looked at some others, but I didn't find any that looked as good.

I just really hate the idea of being charged monthly to use the software. Especially when I don't have any idea how much money this site will bring in. But, that's probably what I'll end up doing, unless I'd save money in the long run by hiring a website developer to create something like that. Could any website developer create a site like that? Any idea how much they'd charge?
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tankctrlr
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25 Mar 14 6:47 am

 It's pretty expensive from what little I know about hiring, I do work on my site but I don't do the serious back-end dev/hiring side of things, I mostly do the front end which is just WordPress. I think we added a little feature recently to our back-end and it was around $1,200, Don't know the hourly rates anymore but I'm thinking $35-40+ an hour?

Which reminds me about a WordPress 'social' plugin called BuddyPress, you might want to look into that one, I haven't used it before but have setup BBPress which is a WordPress Forum plugin, and that seems to do pretty good.

http://buddypress.org/

A lot of marketers will tell you that you should practice creating MVPs first (minimum viable products) before spending the big bucks, to see if the market wants what you got. So basically you build only the very bare-bones of the product first and see if there's a market for it, if not then chuck it, but this way you wouldn't have spent big money to build the FULL product. If it is successful then you can invest more into making the real thing.
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kurt
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25 Mar 14 9:15 pm

 Thanks for that Tank, I was wondering if Wordpress had anything. I'll check it out.
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stevex
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27 Aug 14 5:07 am

 You have to knowledge of coding language then you can understand. From the source code you can see or the inspect element is the best feature to any website.
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