The Client

The client is a startup US company. Predicting a large potential market in China, the company orients its first market in China mainland.

The client requires us to implement the social network web application, which is the base of their business to help them to begin their business. In the first development phase, the following featured functionalities are required:

• Tags: Tags are adopted on each of the objects through out the website, including personal profile, photos, community groups, etc. to enable end user to find the appropriate items on the website easily and fast. Users are allowed to add and customize the tags to enrich the content of the website.
• Image annotation: With this function, users may add annotation to an image to facilitate other users to understand the image. For instance, if the image is a party photo with many people attending, the owner of the photo can easily add names to each person on the photo. Anyone else who have permission to review the photo would be able to get to know the person names and link to the persons profile if the person on the photo is also a member of the website.
• Community establishment: Members may create communities with special theme and each community will have its own affiliate site.
• Offensive report: As a website with web2.0 concept, it is end users who will provide most of content the website. This function will help system admin to manage any offensive issues on the website.
• Private and permission: Users may easily decide with whom or which group he / she would to share his/her information including the profiles, photos or diaries, etc.

The Solution

The application was implemented in English. To fit for Chinese market, the client requires ePeaksoft developing team to localize it within a short period of time. Thanks for the system structure designed by the developing team, which supports internationalization very well, the localization task completed in 2 weeks.

To improve user experience on the website, the client requires to adopt the technology of AJAX. Meanwhile as a startup company, reducing maintenance cost is an important requirement from the client. To meet both the technical requirement and the business requirement, the developing team adopted PHP symfony framework to implement this project.

Symfony provides a lot of features seamlessly integrated together, such as:

• simple templating and helpers
• cache management
• smart URLs
• scaffolding
• multilingualism and I18N support
• object model and MVC separation
• Ajax support