News & Press

Hi everyone,

We've just been notified of an important security issue in SocialEngine. We are distributing a patch that will immediately fix the issue and keep your installation safe. The patch only requires that you replace three files. You can download the standalone patch from the link below, or by logging into our client area and downloading the entire 2.83 zip file.

Download the standalone patch here: socialengine283_patch.zip

If you have any questions about the patch, don't hesitate to create a support ticket.

We would like to give special thanks to Tim Loshak for notifying us about this security issue. You can visit his website (and browse his custom-made SocialEngine plugins) here: socialenginemods.net. He is currently selling an excellent friend inviter plugin, a photo-tagging plugin, and a user points (reward system) plugin.

Once again Tim, our sincere thanks from the Webligo team.

Due to the massive number of requests for a music player on users' profiles, we've released a Music Plugin. This new plugin will give your users a way to upload audio files (with a convenient Java multi-file uploader or a basic HTML form), create a playlist, and share their music on their profiles. The Flash music player we've included is completely skinnable, and your users can pick from any of the default skins (as well as any that you add yourself). The plugin gives your users another outlet for personal expression and makes SocialEngine particularly useful for music-oriented social networks. Existing clients can buy the music plugin from the client area - you will receive download access immediately after your purchase. Three cheers for Brett for creating this awesome SocialEngine plugin!

In other news, the price of SocialEngine has been lowered to $250 US. Grab your copy today!

Update: June 24 - We've just released Music 2.1, which should fix some post-release bugs in this plugin. Go grab the update from the client area!

Update: July 3 - We've now released Music 2.2, which replaces the clunky Java uploader with a steamlined AJAX/Flash uploader.

We are thrilled that many of you are developing your own SocialEngine plugins, mods, tutorials, template sets, etc. Since we've already created a place for you to share your creations for free (the tutorials area), we've created another page (the third-party plugins area) for you to sell your own plugins, templates, etc. If you would like to see your plugins listed on this page, please feel free to email us. If your plugin(s) are approved, we will list them with the other third-party plugins and you can sell them for any price you like.

We've updated our 15-day free trial version of SocialEngine to the most current version, 2.81. The trial is now also bundled with all of our plugins - groups, albums, events, photos, polls, chat, and classifieds. To all of you considering SocialEngine, we think this will give you a good idea of what our platform can do!

Polls and voting features have been requested quite a bit in the past, so we have created an official Polls plugin. This simple plugin allows your users to create their own polls and display links to them on their profiles and recent activity feeds. Your users can also browse through the most popular or most recent polls on your social network. This should add an extra bit of interactivity and fun to your social network. We hope you all enjoy this new addition to our growing feature set!

The Polls plugin is now available for purchase and download in the client area. Give it a whirl on our demo before buying!

Here's something cool. We've finally created a live community for all you SE enthusiasts out there to discuss ideas, mods, and feature requests. I'm sure none of you will be surprised to see that we've used SE as the basis for the new community. We will also be maintaining an informal development blog there, so sign up and join the fun!

Do keep in mind that this is not a source for support from our staff, and not a formal way to contact us for any reason. For support, please login to the client area. To get in touch with us for any other reason, please contact us here.

Alright, come check out the new community!

Here's something many of you have been waiting for. We've released a classifieds plugin! This plugin lets your users post classifieds listings within any categories you create (like "Jobs", "Personals", "For Sale", etc.) Your users' listings will appear in the recent activity feed and on their profiles. Users can also browse your marketplace by category and search criteria, and every category can have its own unique search fields (including numerical ranges for things like price, age, etc.) We really hope you enjoy this addition to the SocialEngine platform.

Meanwhile, the SocialEngine team is growing! Say hello to Brett, our most recent addition to the team. He will be helping many of you with your support tickets, writing new tutorials, and working on new plugins and features for the platform.

Our tutorials area has also grown a bit. Brett and John have each released a tutorial:

1. John's RSS feeds tutorial
2. Brett's top-rated user photos tutorial

You will also now find Russian and German language packs in the tutorials area. They are all very cool - check them out!

It's about time we revisited some of our older plugins and spiced them up a bit! Charlotte has improved the Groups plugin by adding forum-style threaded discussions. We think discussion threads will keep your users more actively engaged with other group members, which translates to more user-generated content and page views for you!

» Go try out the group discussion on our online demos.

Also, we've decided to open up the tutorials area to the public. While tutorial file attachments are still for clients only, anyone can now check out the tutorials before buying SocialEngine. If you would like to share a mod or language pack you've made for SocialEngine, please feel free to send it to us. You are also welcome to link your tutorial to your website and sell your creations.

More good news - our next release will be a Marketplace (classifieds) plugin. We would appreciate any thoughts you might have on what this should include, so feel free to send them. This should be ready in just a few weeks, so stay tuned!

Here's a tasty new plugin - live chat! This plugin lets you install a live chatroom on your social network, allowing your users to interact, create new connections, and have more fun. The chat system utilizes AJAX to put a minimum amount of stress on your server, and management is a snap. Use the admin control panel to kick or ban users if they get out of control. We hope you and all your users will enjoy this new addition to the growing SocialEngine platform.

» Go try out the chat on our online demos.

SocialEngine 2.5 is ready for download! This update includes some minor bug fixes throughout the platform. Also, Charlotte and John have been coding furiously this week to bring you three new mod tutorials:

1. HOW TO: Create A Plugin (Part 1)
   This tutorial guides you through the process of creating your very own SocialEngine plugin.
   
   
2. New users automatically have a friend
   This tutorial shows you how to make every new member friends with someone on your social network, like "Tom" on MySpace.
   
   
3. Rating System
   This tutorial shows you how to add a rating system that your members can use to rate photos, blogs, groups, profiles, etc.

We've created a new clients-only tutorial section where clients can check out tutorials and mods created by other clients as well as the SE team itself. These tutorials offer step-by-step instructions for adding new features to your SE installation. To send it off with a bang, one of our first tutorials is a vBulletin/phpBB2 integration mod that will show you how to integrate either of those popular forum systems with SocialEngine. Although we do not provide support for any of the tutorials, we think they will help you make your social network more useful and fun! Also, if you would like to share a mod that you've already created with the SE community, please feel free to send it to us. We hope you enjoy all the new goodies!

It's here! We are excited to bring all of you some great new (much-requested) functionality - the Events plugin. Now your users can create events and plan their own schedules with personalized calendars. A mini-calendar is also displayed on your users' profile pages. Users can invite each other and RSVP to events. Each event has it's own "profile" page, and users can post comments and upload photos.

Mosey on down to our online demo and give it a try!

The development team has released the SocialEngine 2.1 upgrade as well as an upgrade for the Photo Albums plugin. These upgrades address all of the post-release issues found in the big 2.0 release last month. Now that these are taken care of, we can move ahead with the Events plugin. Development on the Events plugin should end in about a week, and the release will arrive shortly thereafter.

Update (January 9):
We've updated the 15-day free trial version to 2.1. If you've installed the 1.8 version, we encourage you to request a fresh trial to experience 2.1. The online demos have also been updated from 2.0 to 2.1.

Update (January 18):
The Blog Plugin has been updated to version 2.1.

Hooray! We've finally released SocialEngine 2.0. SocialEngine clients may now login to the client area and purchase the 1.8 -> 2.0 upgrade for $25 US. Please note that your upgrade order may take us up to 24 hours to process. If you would prefer that we handle your upgrade process, you can purchase our install service for $19. We will begin filling these installation orders on the 17th (this coming Monday).

Last week's online beta went exceptionally well and we are pleased to see fewer bugs than we had expected. Thank you all for participating in the testing - your feedback was extremely helpful!

Here are answers to some common questions about SE 2.0:

1. When I upgrade from 1.8, will I lose my customizations and layout design?
   The upgrade process involves replacing all of your PHP, TPL, and CSS files. This means that you will lose any changes you have made to these files. Unfortunately there is no easy way to avoid this since we've made so many changes to the platform. If possible, make a note about each change you've made in your current installation so that you can reapply them after the upgrade process.
   
   
2. When I upgrade from 1.8, will I lose my settings and user data?
   Thankfully no! When you upgrade from 1.8, you will run a program that will import all your settings and user data. The only data that will be lost is your users' profile styles and their email notification settings - unfortunately those could not be easily imported into the new platform.
   
   
3. When I upgrade from 1.8, should I make a backup of my current installation?
   Of course! Download all of your SocialEngine files to your computer desktop. Next, use PHPMyAdmin to export your entire database WITH data - choose to save it as an SQL file on your desktop. Now you can proceed with the upgrade. DO NOT try the upgrade yourself if you are unsure how to make a proper backup.
   
   
4. Will the source code in 2.0 still be 100% unencrypted?
   Absolutely.
   
   
5. When can I expect to see the events plugin and forum tutorial?
   Our next task is to create the events plugin. Our goal is to have this released within two weeks of today, but it may in fact come much sooner. The first forum integration tutorial will be for phpBB and will also be released within one or two weeks. Thanks for waiting!

For any kind of technical support regarding 2.0, please create a support ticket. We hope you all enjoy the great new features in SE 2.0!

Thank you all for being so patient, even after the first beta deadline was missed! Today we have finally released the SocialEngine 2.0 Online Beta. The beta allows you to create an account on a demo social network and explore most of the new features we've added in 2.0. You can also login as the admin and have a look around, although you won't be able to save any changes. Here are some things to keep in mind as you explore the beta:

1. This is a beta version! The front-end design is still being dressed up and minor last-minute changes are being made. However, if you find any bugs, please let us know! Be sure to include specific information (e.g. error messages) about how you found the bug, how it can be duplicated, etc. Please be as detailed as possible!
   
   
2. Most of the changes/additions we've made in 2.0 are actually on the back-end. Charlotte has rewritten the entire source code such that it now utilizes an effecient object-oriented structure. This means that even the old features need to be re-tested, so give everything a try. If you have a thorough look over the admin panel, you'll see where most of the actual new features come into play. To review all the new features we've added in 2.0, see the post "Final 2.0 Feature List and Release Date" below.
   
   
3. Be sure to check out some of the great new features such as the admin's Ad Campaigns page and the Recent Activity Feed. These features are in their first version and will be consistently improved based on your feedback, so don't be shy! Our primary goal is to make SocialEngine the best white-label social network platform in the world, so we used 2.0 to bring you advanced social networking features like the Ad Campaigns and Recent Activity Feed. Once 2.0 is stable and the kinks are worked out, we plan to put our effort into developing more user features like an events plugin, an video (flash) tutorial, and a phpBB/vBulletin forum tutorial. So thank you all for being patient - the new user features are on their way!

Access the user beta here: http://beta.socialengine.net
Access the admin beta here: http://beta.socialengine.net/admin

To submit your comments, suggestions, and bug reports, please use our contact form. Do NOT create a support ticket in the client area about the beta - it may not be answered. Thank you!

We are nearing the end of the SocialEngine 2.0 development period, but unfortunately we are slightly behind schedule and will need to make some extra time for final touches and beta testing. We sincerely apologize for the release delay, but we feel that our top priority is to bring you quality, stable software, and sometimes that takes some extra time. Our goal is to have 2.0 available on December 5.

On the bright side, we are going to have a beta version of 2.0 available before the release. We are would like to enlist the help of several current SocialEngine clients to assist with the beta testing process. We will walk through the installation process with you, noting any problems that arise and testing all the various new features. In exchange, you will receive the upgrade free of charge when it is released. Beta testing will be conducted on December 4 between 12:00 PM and 6:00 PM (PST). If you are interested in being a beta tester and are free during this time period, please contact us to get started!

Finally! We have compiled the feature list of the upcoming 2.0 release. We are publishing this feature list with the hope that it will help SocialEngine clients (and potential clients) plan their projects as we approach the 2.0 release. We've made the main platform our first priority and decided to update the current plugins (and develop/release new plugins) after the main platform update is complete.

SocialEngine 2.0 is scheduled to be released on December 1 and will include all of the following features (as well as a multitude of smaller minor changes).

• Renovated platform using a consolidated, object-oriented class structure
  Similar and duplicate code throughout the platform will be converted into shared classes. The entire PHP source code will be upgraded from its current form (mostly procedural) to an almost entirely object-oriented structure. This will reduce SocialEngine's PHP files to a fraction of their original size, cutting down on bulk and making customizations even easier than before. Many of the functions used in various parts of the platform are now consolidated into a single place, so you can make sweeping changes very easily. This will also help you troubleshoot issues or circumvent/remove system bottlenecks if necessary. Functions are now grouped by type to help avoid conflicts with updates and modifications made to the source code.
  
  
• Facebook-style "recent activity" list with RSS feed
  SocialEngine will keep track of your users' actions and publish them in a list on the "My Home" and "Profile" pages. As the admin, you will specify what actions will be published and how often. Users can optionally delete items published about them and configure their own privacy settings.
  
  
• Multiple user levels
  As the admin, you can now create multiple user levels. These are groups of users that have varying limits and access to features. For example, you may want to offer levels like "Free", "Silver", and "Gold". Note that PayPal (or any other payment processing solution) will NOT immediately be integrated into 2.0, although you will be able to customize the source code to allow this functionality quite easily.
  
  
• Ad campaign management with user level and subnetwork targeting
  As the admin, you can now create and monitor ad campaigns. Campaigns can be setup to use a banner uploaded from your computer, or you can insert any HTML or Javascript (e.g. Google Adsense code). Impressions, clicks, and click-through-ratio (CTR) are automatically tracked. You can set campaigns to begin and end on certain dates, or end if their number of impressions or clicks hit a limit you specify. To avoid poorly-performing campaigns, you can also set a campaign to end if its CTR dips below a low threshold you specify. Without any changes to the HTML templates, ads can be set to automatically appear on various positions on your social network. Alternatively, you can insert a snippet of code into any template to show the ad on a specific page. Ad campaigns can be targeted to specific subnetworks or user levels, allowing you to show ads to people based on their profile information (e.g. interests, gender, age, etc.) thereby drastically increasing the effectiveness of your ads.
  
  
• Improved, more attractive front-end design
  We've refreshed the clean look of SocialEngine with subtle changes throughout the design.
  
  
• AJAX commenting and status updates
  Comments and status updates are now posted instantly (without a page refresh) using a seamless AJAX interface. Other small AJAX implementations have been applied throughout SocialEngine to further improve the user experience.
  
  
• Consolidated database query function
  Before SocialEngine 2.0, database queries were executed using PHP's mysql_query() function. These queries can be found in hundreds of places throughout the source code. With the creation of the "$database" object in 2.0, every query that is run by the platform is passed through a single method. This makes it much easier to integrate SocialEngine into other RDMBS like MSSQL or PostgreSQL. This also assists greatly with troubleshooting slow queries.
  
  
• User level or subnetworks-specific announcements
  As the admin, you can now post announcements that will only be visible to specific user levels or subnetworks.
  
  
• Multi-language (user can select their own language)
  This highly-requested feature allows users to view the social network in the language they choose, provided that you (the admin) have created a language pack for their language.
  
  
• Automatic update notifications from SocialEngine.net
  The SocialEngine admin panel now automatically (but non-annoyingly) notifies you when an update is available for the platform or any of the official plugins.
  
  
• New extensible plugin interface
  Plugins are now truly "plug-and play" and can be managed from a single section of the admin panel. Since plugins now follow a standardized format, custom plugins can now be designed and installed with ease.
  
  
• Section to view outgoing friend invitations
  Users can now see both their incoming and outgoing friendship invitations. This helps them keep track of their relationships in a more organized fashion. If you would rather have users not see their outgoing friend invitations, you can easily remove this option from the template.
  
  
• Online/Offline icons on profile and search results
  Icons are now used to indicate when a user is online. By default, these will appear on users' profiles and in search results.
  
  
• HTML in profile fields
  As the admin, you can now choose to allow HTML in specific profile fields. You can also optionally limit which HTML tags and properties are allowed. This is very useful if you want to allow users to style the profile content or embed an external object like a music player or YouTube video.
  
  
• Make dependent fields linkable
  Dependent profile fields may now be set to "linkable". If this is turned on and a user enters text separated by commas, the keywords will be linked. When a keyword is clicked, the viewer is taken to a page that lists all users on the social network that have entered that keyword in that profile field.
  
  
• Ability to retrieve admin password
  Admin passwords can now be retrieved if lost.
  
  

Events Plugin
We know that many of you have been waiting patiently for the Events plugin. While we are fully aware of the importance of this plugin, we are going to release it on December 7 - just one week after the main 2.0 release. We feel that our goal of releasing a stable, well-designed, main platform is paramount, so unfortunately the Events plugin will need to come just one week later.

Forum Integration Tutorial
We also know that many of you are waiting for a phpBB/vBulletin forums integration plugin. After much research, we've decided to release this as an tutorial (instead of an official plugin). This is because many of you have different forum setups (with various modifications, servers, etc.) which makes creating a single solution quite difficult. Our tutorial will give you very simple step-by-step instructions for integrating your phpBB or vBulletin forum into SocialEngine.

Other Tutorials
Shortly after the 2.0 release, we will open a new section of this website that will include tutorials which give you instructions about how to add other various features to SocialEngine. Among others, these tutorials will likely include:

• phpBB and vBulletin Forum Integration
• Video integration (with automatic Flash conversion)
• PHPFox database import
• DZOIC Handshakes import
• Userplane Chat/IM

We will also be giving SocialEngine clients the ability to write their own tutorials and comments. This should be an exciting new period for SocialEngine - we look forward to sharing it with you!

Good news for those of you that have been following SocialEngine for a while but haven't bought a license just yet. Today we've released a free 15-day trial of SocialEngine 1.8 and all the available plugins. You can download the trial and install it on your server in minutes! The trial is fully functional except that it expires in 15 days, most of the PHP source code is encrypted, and no support is provided. Here's your chance to see how SocialEngine works on your server - play with the features and settings to get a good feel for the platform. If you decide to purchase a license, you can keep all the content you've created on your trial installation. Enjoy!

We've released a new version of the platform today, SocialEngine 1.8. This update fixes several minor bugs we've found over the past several weeks, namely issues we've found within the FCKeditor component, the admin's statistics area, the post comment page, and several small language oversights. SocialEngine 1.X is now remarkably stable, so to celebrate we will be bringing you a whole new version of the platform! Our development manager Charlotte has been making excellent progress with the SocialEngine 2.0 alpha, and she has taken many of your feature requests into account. We will be posting a news announcement with a definitive feature list for SE 2.0 early next week.

Great news everyone! SocialEngine 1.7 is out, and the platform is now extremely stable. The last few bugs we could find were fixed, including bad-word censoring, content-specific search issues, and a minor problem with friendship types. Charlotte also made some great improvements based on your suggestions, such as allowing private user profiles to display (but only with the user's photo and a "profile is private" message), trimming down extraneous code from the functions libaries, allowing you to specify a URL to send users when they login, and a number of other minor changes. We hope you all enjoy the new version!

After much nagging, we've finally created a SocialEngine Newsletter. Sign up to start receiving email notifications when we post news announcements about new releases, important updates, and future plans. You don't have to be a SocialEngine client to signup, it's open for everyone!

We are happy to announce the release of SocialEngine 1.5. This update has fixed all the small bugs you have reported, so things are looking great. Charlotte and I are beginning discussions about creating an API that will make integrating third-party applications (as well as developing your own plugins) much easier. We are still organizing our thoughts on this, but we are hoping to have it published in 1-2 months or sooner. We are also creating a list of plugins that will be developed and released in the near future, so those will be announced soon. If you have a feature request or two, now would be an excellent time to share them with us!

Charlotte and I are excited to announce the release of SocialEngine 1.5. For those of you running into trouble with subnetworks, your salvation is here. We've simplified the subnetworks admin area and fixed the logic so that users are now properly sorted depending on their profile information.

So how do subnetworks work anyway? Subnetworks are one of the features that truly set SocialEngine apart from its competitors. As the admin, you can create "subnetwork rules" which determine how your users are sorted. For example, if you wanted to sort your users by age, you could create the following rules:


If you want to take this more in depth and split users based on several criteria (e.g. age and gender), you could use the following rules:


A lot of people have asked us, "how do I show ads to a specific subnetwork?" When a user is logged in, the header.php file sets a variable named {$user_subnetwork}. This variable contains the name of the subnetwork the user belongs to. Using the example above, if you want to show a specific ad only to "Women over 18 years old" on the top of every page, you could add something like this to the header.tpl template file:


We hope you all enjoy this great feature!

Since SocialEngine's first release, our team has received an overwhelming number of requests for custom projects. However, we are committed to focusing on improving the product itself and developing new features and plugins. To solve this problem, we've been seeking out third-party development firms that can take on all of your exciting SocialEngine project ideas. Today, we've added UK-based Atomix Web Solutions to our list of integration partners. If you're ready to get your custom SocialEngine project underway, send your project details to Atomix managing director Lee Sargeant for more information.

The response to SocialEngine has been overwhelming! We are excited to see such a huge influx of SocialEngine customers and fans. We would like to add someone to our in-house team to help with customer support and product development. Here is a copy of the job listing:

Thanks to everyone that reported all the minor bugs we missed throughout the platform. We've gone through several version updates over the last few days, and SocialEngine has now reached version 1.4. We've also released a series of updates for the Blogs, Groups, and Photo Album addons. Their versions have now reached Albums 1.2, Blogs 1.2, and Groups 1.3. Of course, these are all 100% compatible with SocialEngine 1.X. A few more bugs have been reported, so the SocialEngine 1.5 release is planned for the first week of August.

We are pleased to announce the very first patch to the SocialEngine platform. Thanks to all of you that reported some key bugs that we missed in the beta. Also, thanks for everyone's excellent feature requests. We are compiling a list of often-requested features to include in upcoming versions. Stay tuned!

Pasadena, CA (June 6, 2007) - Two college-aged software entrepreneurs hailing from Webligo, a budding Pasadena-based company specializing in web-based software development, have released a new social networking platform called SocialEngine. Webligo's young developing duo, Alex Benzer and Charlotte Genevier, have already developed several popular web-based software applications that have earned the acclaim of local media as well as thousands of webmasters worldwide. With SocialEngine, the developers aim to give individual webmasters and small organizations a comprehensive yet simple way to build social networks.

SocialEngine (http://www.socialengine.net) is a PHP-based white-label social network platform that installs a full-featured social network on your website. Like other products, it includes most of today's popular features such as blogs, photo and video albums, interest groups, and so forth. What makes SocialEngine unique is its unprecedented extensibility and customizability. While other products give you cookie-cutter designs and an overwhelming mound of features for users, SocialEngine offers simplicity, ease of use, and complete control over the appearance and functionality of your social network. The developers designed SocialEngine to highlight your unique concept instead of the platform itself. In that vein, SocialEngine is the only product of its kind that does not force any copyright statements or branding on the visible areas of your social network.

Another unique aspect of SocialEngine is its capability to have "subnetworks." SocialEngine automatically sorts your users into these subnetworks depending on the rules you (the administrator) have set. For example, you can organize users by age, location, profession, university, and so forth. Smart administrators will use this feature to show highly-targeted advertisements to their users, generating above-average advertising returns.

Unlike other products, SocialEngine also lets you design your social network from a structural perspective. You can decide how users will associate with each other, what privacy options they will have, whether users must be invited to sign up, and more. To learn more about SocialEngine, visit the product website: http://www.socialengine.net or Webligo's company website at http://www.webligo.com

The development team is thrilled to announce the first official release of our breakthrough social network platform, SocialEngine. We are now accepting purchase orders from the public via our order page. Shortly following your order, you will receive an email with your license information and instructions to download the software package. If you decide not to take advantage of our installation service, installation instructions are included with the downloadable package. SocialEngine has a very exciting development future! We want you to submit your feature requests so that we can potentially incorporate them into future versions of the platform.