MotoBabble ([color="#0000FF"]motobabble.com[/color]) is an automotive social network powered by Yii. We began building the site roughly a year ago and just released our first public beta on 03/15/12.
The concept connects users with vehicles instead of other users necessarily. Each user can connect their "owner profile" to the vehicles they own, have previously owned, or hope to own in the future. Here is my profile: [color="#0000FF"]motobabble.com/phil[/color]
The vehicles a user owns, or previously owned, have vehicle profiles that contain basic details, modification information, and photos albums (more options coming in the future). Users are able to follow vehicles they are interested in for updates in their feed.
On a more advanced level, users are able to tag modifications they’ve made in uploaded photos of their vehicles, as well as adding previous modifications with Install / Removal Dates to track the progress of their setups.
Right now we’re targeting more toward the enthusiast market but plan to build the site into a utility that is useful for all. MB also has a various other features that will begin to expand over the next year.
Private Messages between users
Friend / Follow features for owner profiles
A hand-built forum / Q&A system
Search
Vehicle browser (currently under development)
Events (coming soon)
Yii’s MVC structure has helped to keep us very organized as we continue to build and add new features. We also use HTML5 history saves in conjunction with ajax page calls cutting down loading times and making MB a fully ajax’ed web site. We’ve made extensive use of CActiveRecord to make our database calls and entries very painless and simple, as well as the theming scheme to provide an easy versioning system for updates, whether it be sitewide or only for specific users.
Our current development schedule has us making various updates to the site every month to improve and introduce new features. Feel free to check it out and leave some comments.
We fixed the verbiage on the search page. It wasn’t actually an “error” but search is a feature that is restricted to registered users.
Currently, the app requires a user to be logged in to use. In a coming update we will have a link on the home page to our Vehicle Browser allowing users to see vehicles on the site.
Very nice job Philip. I love the design, Twitter’s Boostrap I guess but with a little something. I registered of course out of curiosity, but who knows!
I’ve gotten some messages from many of you and just wanted to say that we appreciate the interest and more importantly all of the fantastic suggestions and support from the Yii community members.
We’ve implemented a basic vehicle browser available from the home page now for guests to browse. In our live environment it’s not responding quite as fast as it was in development so we’ll have an update out in a few days to try and address some performance issues with it.
Hey Phill, very nice work. Would you like to share more details with us? Did you use any of the available extensions for the social network part or you coded it from scratch?
I’m also curious about how many connections you can handle at the moment, and any other consideration can help those who are willing to create a similar project.
