By Sniget on

Sniget is a free business platform to perform your daily tasks. It can let you display contents and manage your business through cloud based apps in one platform. Sniget enables users to communicate, collaborate, and manage more easily and efficiently than ever before. Instead of registering and paying to many different websites to use multiple software and web tools, you can register at Sniget to get all your needs without costing you money.
Let's say you are working on a new project which needs an online management tool and you also want to do market research for that project by doing survey. So you'll need to register at two different website to perform both tasks. But with Sniget, you can simply go to Apps page and add project managing app & Survey app to perform both tasks. You don't need to download or install any software. As long as you have an access to Internet, you can enjoy the freedom of Sniget web based apps.

Features

  • Company-Group like interface where users can become member and instantly they can collaborate, transfer files, post resources, broadcast to member. It can be set up to be open or private, visible or hidden.
  • Directory-Make your business search-able by anyone
  • Crowdfunding(coming soon)- have an idea but need funding to make it happen, then crowdfund it on Sniget
  • Opportunity Center-Post your job or opportunity here to source internal and external talent
  • Apps-Based on your business requirement, you can simply add any app you need for free
  • Profile-Make your business in more professional look with your expertise, past work experience, social feeds and contact information to become discoverable.
  • Dashboard-Manage everything from here with drag and drop interface like iGoogle.

    Core Apps

    Once you register on Sniget, you can start using Core Apps straight away.

  • Personal Calendar-Simple Drag and Drop Calendar with RSVP
  • Company Calendar-Same as Personal Calendar but it is integrated with Company feature-Calendar for your company member
  • Task Manger-Manage and assign your daily tasks
  • Messaging-send messages to users and get notified with email
  • Filemanager-Manage and share your files with Drag and Drop file upload feature

    Apps

    Apps work as an extension to your business which helps you to interact with you and your clients through cloud. Based on your business requirement, you can simply add any app you need for free. All apps are cloud based and no installation require. All the apps are hosted on Sniget and you don't need to worry about sharing your data to third party or no extra registration required.

    Why Drupal?

    Before answering this question we would like to give some background of Sniget. The main reason why we created this platform is to give freedom of doing business online using the power of opensource and community. Before starting this project, we did alot of research. Most of the CMS are not fully opensource or lack of many capabilities. On the other hand, we're looking for something there is no barrier. Something there is no limitation. That's when Drupal came to our attention. With thousand of modules, powerful community, unlimited resources and integration with jquery, I truly believe you can build any website you want. The main reasons why we chose Drupal is because it provides:

  • Being opensource with many integrations.
  • Module system which can help us to create our web application platform
  • Large and friendly community for support and guidance
  • Highly secured and flexible to extend

    Modules

    As Sniget is a web-application site, we need to use hundred of modules to build this site and it's kind of hard for me to cover every single module. Below list is the major modules we used but if you have any specific module question, you can contact me anytime.

  • Flag: We used this module for adding apps from Apps page.
  • User Relationships: Allows users to become connected like social networking site.
  • Facebook-style Statuses & Facebook-style Statuses Comment: With this module, you can create wall like facebook
  • Privatemsg:I really love this module. Lets users send each other messages on the site without disclosing e-mail addresses. File attachment feature makes it really powerful as well.
  • IMCE: We use this module together with CKeditor for file uploading
  • Imagecache: Create presets for different image sizes and cache them. Recommend for any image using site.
  • Views: We used this module quite alot for creating apps dashboard and I truly believe there won't be Drupal without this module.
  • User comment: Provides more flexible permissions control comments. We want to give as much as control to users on their content and this became the most useful module.

    • Custom Modules

    Drag and Drop Box- For our file manager, we used Drupal Drag and Drop Upload module and Peek module but we did alot of customization to get what we needed.
    Calendar- We started this project about a year ago and until then there was no Fullcalendar module in Drupal. So, we created completely new module to integrate with Arshaw's Jquery Fullcalendar.

    Drupal & Cloud Apps

    All the apps in Sniget are built from Drupal modules. We used most of the contributed modules and in house built modules which will be contributed to the community once we can get out of beta stage. With Drupal content type based workflow and the flexibility of its permission system, creating application is alot easier than we thought. Using Views and CCK modules, we built all our dashboard for apps.

    Subdomain with Single Sign-on

    As we were adding more and more apps on Sniget, we started to face problem like module conflicts and site became very slow due to expanding database tables. We did alot of research to find the best solution and luckily we found this article on Lullabot(http://www.lullabot.com/articles/drupal-single-sign-across-sub-domains). Then we decided to keep some apps on subdomain but user table will be shared across to enable sign-on feature.

    Why Beta?

    The main reason why it's still Beta is we would like to know what users think of our Apps and it is pretty hard to cover every functionality in the large site. Another reason is we haven't included some of the apps as we need to do in-house testing.

    Lesson Learned...

    We would like to share some of the difficulties that we faced during our developing period.
    1. Sniget theme was built from scratch initially. That became a bigger issue for us in the later stage of development. Sometime modules are not working well with the custom theme and community cannot give any support as the theme is custom made. So if we do any developing with Drupal next time, we will use one of the most suitable theme from Drupal contributed themes and customize to what we want.
    2. Never hesitate to post your problem. In the beginning, we spent so much time on the issues which we can easily get the answer from community.
    3. Views and CCK with php. We believe these two modules are the main foundation of Drupal. If we use well together with basic php, we can do alot of powerful stuffs. So we suggest to Drupal newbies to get grip hold on these two modules before starting.

    What's Next?

    Currently we're trying to clean up some issues of the outstanding apps and features. We also want to integrate our current features more effectively with OG and User Relationship modules. As soon as we can get out of beta stage, we will contribute most of the in-house modules and sponsor more projects which can be very useful to the community.

    Credit

    We would like appreciate all the helps from Netscriper(www.netscriper.co.uk) for creating the best theme and Tejas from www.indianic.com for creating Calendar and Drag & Drop Box. These guys were really helpful and very patient with our demanding.

    ⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x