As promised oh so many weeks ago, myJournal is now live. At the moment it’s in a beta state so membership is by invitation only, however visitors have full access to all the public parts of the site. It’s aimed to be a powerful social networking tool specifically for businesses and is packed with features:
- Member profiles
- Multiple sites per member
- Sites can be company sites or personal sites
- Company sites have a showroom (an online product brochure, with multiple images per product, product categories and a really powerful management tool)
- Company sites and personal sites have a gallery where images and videos can be uploaded
- Members can create and join networks. The administration functions for networks are really extensive:
- Make networks open membership, or membership by invitation only
- Make networks private, meaning the network can be seen but all members remain hidden (except to other members of that networks)
- Network discussions, based on the great bbPress software, with attachments
- Network administers can revoke network invitations, ban members, and promote/demote members to be administrators
- Members and companies can choose a number of industries to be in – the list of industries is pretty massive
- Private messaging feature which handles multiple recipients and attachments
- Featured members and networks, which appear around the site
- “Who’s online?” feature
And the entire system is available for organisations that wish to run their own business social networking site. If you’re interested in that please contact us for more details.
The whole thing wouldn’t be possible without the wonderful WordPress MU platform, which I believe I’ve pushed to the very edge! Also my thanks go to Andy Peatling of BuddyPress fame for many, many hours chatting, helping me with code and generally being a good egg. It’s my pleasure to have offered the entire myJournal codebase to BuddyPress for their open source system, and I know some parts have already made it into builds.
Obviously there’s still a lot to do – how come so many bugs only make themselves visible when a beta version has gone live? – but I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve done so far. Hopefully we’ll end up with a site that will help businesses really get the best out of the web.