Preface
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Chapter 5 shows you how to implement friends, how to search for them, nd them in
the site's listings, and import your contacts into the site to nd your friends.
Chapter 6 helps you create a full blown messaging system that will resemble a
web-based email application similar to Hotmail or Gmail. We will also learn how to
implement the Xinha WYSIWYG editor in a way that can be re-used easily across the
site for complex inputs.
Chapter 7 covers details on how to build a generic media management system that
will allow you to host video, photos, resumes, or any number of physical les with
minimal tweaking. It also addresses the issue of multi-le uploads—one of the
biggest limitations of many web programming environments.
Chapter 8 is all about Blogging. With search engines, users, and security in mind,
we invest a part of this chapter to address an issue that plagues many dynamic
websites—query string data being used to determine page output.
Chapter 9 discusses the creation of the core features of a message board—categories,
forums, threads, and posts. Along with these features, the chapter also implements
friendly URLs to make our content more suitable for search engine optimization.
Chapter 10 covers the concept of Groups. It focuses on how groups can be used to
bring many different systems together in a way to start creation of sub-communities.
Chapter 11 helps us build three controls to allow our users to express their opinions
about various content areas of our site—tagging, rating and commenting. Tagging
control allows us to take in tag keywords as well as display all the tags for various
levels of our site from specic records. Rating control allows us to congure many
options per system object for individual ratings. And commenting control helps
users to express very specic opinions regarding our content items.
Chapter 12 focuses on Moderation, that is, the means to manage community providedcommunity provided
content using a very simple agging tool. It also covers methods such as Gagging to
deal with habitual rule breakers. Finally, it takes a look at what Cross-site scripting
(CSS) is, and some measures that can be taken to address it.
Chapter 13 discusses some concepts to help you support a large number of users on
your social network. It starts by looking at some key concepts of web farming. Then
it goes on to discuss ways to create and search indexed data, methods to optimize
data retrieval and content creation, and nally some mail queuing concepts.
Appendix A covers version control and ways to set up your database. It then moves
on to various third-party and open source tools such as StructureMap, NAnt,
ReSharper, and so on, which will help you create a stable development platform.