Social Networking Website on DotNetNuke

The client

This is an emerging software design & development company based in USA.

What the client wanted

The client desired a network community website through which people (especially children) could play educational games with others and share his/her thoughts. The required website mainly covers the following functions:

• Trivia Creation: users can submit question if it is educational enough.
• Trivia Game: there are some excellent games such as One-on-One Battle, Tournament Play etc.
• Widget: This is an online game users can directly play on or copy the game and place it in their own site (facebook, digg, myspace, blogs, etc).
• Community: it covers some typical social networking features such as news, blogs, and forums.

The challenge was that the website had to be fully integrated with a CMS product developed in DotNetNuke, so all modules and the site structure must be built on DotNetNuke platform. It was also required that the website had to be fully secured against possible intruders, and integrated into the flash game, making real-time interaction with the flash game.

Solution

As the requirement the client provided was quite rough, the development team, in the first phase, was dedicated to collecting and clarifying the requirement. In the following phase, we completed the screen shots (prototype) design and the business logic flowchart from module to module .

According to the client, there would be hundreds of thousands players/users operate online synchronously, which demands very high performance of the game/website. Besides, user experience  is another important factor must be taken into consideration. We did lots of related works about the performance and user experience, including the graphic and database design optimization.

The client also required the website to be more flexible, reliable and funny to attract the potential users' attention. To solve this issue, we analyzed the search algorithms, optimized the strategy detail and imitated the real web game environment and simulated the virtual player suit for testing. We utilize the AJAX Mode to improve user experience.

Since it is a Social Network website, we also integrated some typical features into it, such as a real-time communication tool similar with an Instant Messenger, with which the user's friends list and predefined buttons could be displayed. Besides, the website needs to support more features in separate scenarios, such as detailed search function. We recommended the Server-Push technique, which is more instant than Client Polls the client originally wanted to use.

Environment

• OS: Windows Server2003, Windows XP sp2
• Development Tools: Visual Studio 2005, Photoshop CS3, Ultra edit
• Development Language: C#, VB.Net, HTML, JavaScript, PHP, Flash ActionScript
• Application Server: IIS 6.0
• Database: SQL Server 2005

The benefits

• A tangible and substantial solution was provided.
• The development cost has been largely cut down.
• Agile deployment, agile development resulted in quick delivery and high efficiency.
• An extensible and scalable website with DotNetNuke framework

 

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