Hello,

I have got a really great idea for a new social network site. The main thing I'm struggling with at the moment is how to get e-mail notifications working.

Say I create a "Post a comment about this member" button and I want it to e-mail that member with "You got a new comment". How do they do this? Any help would be much appreciated.

Also - are there any coding guides out there for building a social network? I am doing it from scratch so it's going to be quite basic to start with, but I do not want to risk dilluting this great concept with "pre-packaged" scripts.


Thank you.

If you can't get email notifications working, you oughta hire a real programmer to make the site - it'll save you a headache down the line. :)

If you're using PHP: http://php.net/mail

If I had money to hire someone for the site, I wouldn't be making the site :stickout:

I think I can get most stuff working, the main things I am concerned about are drag-and-drop widgets, some ajax stuff and the email sendouts.

If you post a new notification on someone's profile then what function would e-mail that? Is it like a cron job or something? How hard is this to set up?

Your first concern is to make the website work - think about ajax, widget and other "eye" looking features when you are more advanced - otherwise you will stay stuck.

Yeah I think that's a good idea - keeping things simple first. But the e-mail notifications is a must for any social site I think. I've just never learned how to do it though. What class would you take to learn that kind of thing? Php, CGI??

have you tried some standard CMSs like drupal, joomla, xoops....? latter two are easier to learn.

IMO if your still at this early stage.. You shouldn't be worrying about email notifications yet either.

I figured it out ... thanks . I'm just going to use phpmail function. But will worry about aggregating email notifications later. when the network is successful I should be able to hire someone to work on it full time, but for now I'm trying to get the basic idea down in code.

Thanks for the info.

the best thing to use for email is php mailer sourceforge.net/projects/phpmailer/ (and use smtp, not sendmail)
You will also need a function on top of that with a cron that staggers the email(send in small batches) also add ability to use multiple smtp servers(in case your site gets a few hundred thousand members) I know its early but its much easier to add the functionality now and switch it on when needed then to add it when needed.
I can help you with a lot of small stuff like this
pm me your msn/ym/icq/gtalk if you wish.

be careful about your mailer function you don't want to get it abused from spammers :)

I run a social network website.

The sending an email is a good idea, however you also dont want to be sending people too much of the same. If they get 50 people adding a comment to their profile they shouldnt get 50 email alerts.

Personal message syes, comments on like a guestbook, no