A Christian Social Networking Site

So, I’ve had this idea for a while now about a website something like Facebook, but for Christians. I quit Facebook a while back because, among other reasons, there were trashy ads, I would see friends of friends’ photos and status updates that I’d rather not see, and just general stuff that a Christian doesn’t exactly find appealing.

I’m about to go geeky on you, so just bear with me.

I love WordPress. There’s a social plugin called BuddyPress that I really, really wanted to use. It’s lightweight, fast and pretty configurable. It looks somewhat like Facebook, so it would be familiar to those who moved over (or at least used both).

A couple weeks into it, I found it wasn’t going to cut it. I’d been trying to get a real-time chat script to work on it, but ran into a wall. Several times. then I found JomSocial. This is a social layer built on top of a powerful CMS called Joomla. I’ve actually tried Joomla before, but it was a long time ago and it was way over my head. I’ve learned a little bit about web stuff since then, and it actually makes sense (mostly) to me now.

JomSocial had a lot of the stuff I already wanted – photos, videos, walls, activity feeds, friends, groups…you get the picture. It didn’t have chat built in though. I tried the same script on this software, and voila! It just worked! So far, everything I’ve tried to do with this software has worked, and worked well.

Now that you’ve gotten through the geeky stuff, you may be wondering what this Christian website is? It’s called Friends of Faith. Feel free to go take a visit and sign up. It’s still growing, and things are changing, but that’s half the fun!