All of us nowadays visit and participate in social sites and networks. Practically a social network is a web site where users take action and not just read content. Digg.com and Facebook are perfect examples of such sites.

PHPizabi is an open-source script written in PHP (like the name shows) which is aimed to help developers create their own social site in fiew steps. As most of web apps (like WordPress), PHPizabi requires:

PHP 4.2.x or above
MySQL 3.23.x or above
Apache 1.13.19 or above OR IIS 5.1 or above
GD2 (Image Processor)

PHPizabi is built with security in mind: there are three administrative security layers and internal structure management, coupled with bruteforce protection. The app seems to be fast (though I have not tested it under heavy load). Modules (add ons) are supported, so developers can expand functionality and features with few clicks.

The end user experience seems to be complete, compared to famous social networks: customizable profiles, internal message sending (PMs), online-offline status, friend invitations, private photo gallery, smilies, comments and all the cool stuff used around. You can see a complete list of the features in the official PHPizabi web site. A demo installation can be found here.

In general PHPizabi seems to be a usefull platform for building social sites and is supported by an ongrowing community. If anyone uses PHPizabi and has tested it under heavy load, feel free to leave a comment and share your experience with us !

We made some changes to our database, as our store needed some input fields for orders (for customers to write their name, email, adress and anything they want to appear on the cards they orders). The changes include some new MySQL tables and some php scipting code to support the tables. Our store now is fully functional and in a few days we will be able to accept orders. Another change we made is to out blog. We modified the .htaccess file, so wordpress can build nice pemalinks for the posts. WordPress is based on php and the permalinks it gives are like this: http://blog.typpz.com/?p=7. With the Apache mod_rewrite modification in the .htaccess file of wordpress, our permalinks now are nicier and look like this: http://blog.typpz.com/year/month/day/post-title which are more user friendly and more robot friendly (for better crawling by search engines). To modify your .htaccess file you should give it a chmod 777 (write and execute permission, so wordpress can change it) with your ftp client (like filezilla) and then change the permalink style via wordpress admin. Do not forget to change the chmod for .htaccess file to 644 for better security after the modificitation.