Technology Overview
Although we're quite proud of our technology, we understand that social media isn't about technology -- it's about people. Your technology should work so well that your people don't have to worry about it. And the people who provide the platform should understand that you and your people come first. Always.
Communifire is built with the latest in technology platforms, using the ASP.NET 3.5 Framework, C#, MS AJAX, jQuery, and Microsoft SQL Server as the database.
Self Hosted or SaaS
Install and run Communifire on your own servers or use ours.
Either way, you still maintain full control. With Communifire, you own the data,
the users, and all information in the
community. We will never market our services (or services of others) to your community's
user-base.
Architectural Overview
Communifire's architecture is based on a scalable and robust N-tier enterprise SOA
architecture and contains fully object oriented code, an optimized database schema,
strongly typed objects & collections, data caching, and a unique state management system,
ensuring that Communifire can scale to accommodate the most demanding high-traffic communities.
Communifire is built on a flexible provider-based framework:
- Apply updates with ease - Communifire provider model architecture isolates the core platform upgrade process from affecting your custom individual modifications
- Flexible and extensible - Makes interaction with external components a breeze by allowing you to override our code or tap into 'hooks' that are called before and after events
- Use any database you like - Gives you the flexibility in how you store your data. There's no need to change or modify existing application code to use alternate tables or databases for your data storage requirements
- Makes writing custom providers as simple as possible - by providing a robust and well-documented set of base classes from which developers can derive provider classes of their own
Since Communifire comes with a default implementation for all provider based features (such as the ForumsProvider, BlogsProvider, UserProvider, etc.), the provider model offers the best of both worlds -- to those who are content with the default implementation, the system just works as expected; for those that need to customize the system, they can do so without upsetting the existing code or programmatic logic.
User Interface
Why should your brand suffer under someone else's look and feel? Communifire lets you easily customize your entire community by adjusting a single style sheet.
The UI layer in Communifire is a Web Application Project created in ASP.NET 3.5 and VS 2008. It contains the graphical display components and files
such as ASPX, ASCX, MasterPages, stylesheets, images, resource files, and so on.
- Resources such as styles sheets, javascript files, images, icons, etc. are located in the /Assets folder
- Web pages use CSS based styles using only "div" tags. Tables are only used when it absolutely makes sense to use them.
- The look and feel of the front-end can be easily modified by just changing the CSS file
- Web pages are properly segmented into their own respective folders
- The web project uses ASP.NET MVC framework routing engine (System.Web.Routing) to create extension-less URLs (for SEO optimization)