phpFox v1.6 to have OpenSocial support

We are pleased to announce that phpFox 1.6 will soon have OpenSocial support. We had initially intended to add support with phpFox2, however after following up on a thread and with our recent partnership with AITOC, INC. that brought forth new modules to our product gave us the opportunity to look into developing support for OpenSocial with phpFox v1.6.

Aitoc will be in charge of the project and developing the module thus allowing us the time to continue development of phpFox2, which we had considered postponing if we were to release an OpenSocial module.

Aitoc is currently working on the project model, which should take 3 weeks. At that time we should have more information to release on when the module will be completed, the price tag, features and its requirements.

For those that are not familiar with OpenSocial and its capabilities I will try to explain in more detail what it is and what it can do for your community. You can of course find out this information directly from OpenSocial and the developers of the API; Google here.

Google has created an API that works on many popular social networking sites such as MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut etc...

Since developers have to work with one API provided by OpenSocial developing Apps is rather easy as the same App can be spread onto several if not all social networking sites that support OpenSocial. Since many of these large communities have recently opened their doors to support OpenSocial there are hundreds upon thousands of applications out there and many more being developed each day. By adding support for OpenSocial this will open your site to this very large development community and the ability to use Apps that you see on major sites like MySpace on your phpFox website instantly. By instantly I really do mean instantly, since installing Apps is simple as pointing to where the XML (which is where the code for the App is located) file is located.

Applications are not stored on your server, they usually connect via a container which gets and caches the source code that runs the App from the developers. The container that will be used is Apache Shindig. They have a PHP container, which has a set of classes that will allow phpFox sites the ability to setup an App server.

Upgrading OpenSocial Apps to work with phpFox2 will not cause any problems. Why? Since Apps are developed using the same OpenSocial API the same API will still be used with phpFox2 and any future version, all that needs to be done is for us to update the class files that return the correct information. So you as phpFox community owners will have nothing to worry about. Such Apps are great as you don't have to worry about what files were overwritten and if its supported with the current version you have installed.

There are a lot of benefits for phpFox community owners as you can imagine. There is also a lot of benefits for those that develop mods for the phpFox community as well. Not only will your Apps work on a phpFox community, your Apps will work on any community the supports and follows the OpenSocial API.

More information regarding the module will follow in 3 weeks once Aitoc has completed the project model and prototype.

If you have any ideas of how you would like this module to function please let us know by adding your comments here or via our forum.

Thanks!