I have open-sourced (Apache 2 licence) the Python-based LexaLink platform, which is a free social networking and dating software package that is designed from the ground up to run on the App Engine. Information about LexaLink can be found at
http://www.LexaLink.com and the git repository can be found at
: https://github.com/lexalink/LexaLink.git.
Currently LexaLink is used to run seven different websites (dating, language exchange, etc.). This is a serious commercial-quality software package that is running websites that serve millions of pages per month.
We hope that with this announcement, LexaLink will be used by many more websites, and that the community will give back their enhancements to the open-source codebase.
Features of the platform include (as of Oct 16, 2012) :
- User registration and authentication - sends email to user and provides a secret link to activate their account
- Custom session management
- User defined profiles including text description, photos, and checkbox fields related to their interests
- Efficient searches through profiles based on user-defined search criteria
- One-on-one chat functionality as well as group chat (polling based)
- Management of virtual kisses, winks, etc.
- Ability to mark photos as private and to send a "key" to users that you wish to have access to the photo
- Code for processing paypal payments and awarding VIP status to clients that make a payment
- Multi-lingual (the platform currently works in both Spanish and English)
- Sending email notifications of new messages and of new kisses/winks/etc.
- Sophisticated logs that notify the administrator of internal errors and unexpected conditions
- Photo-review page for quickly approving or rejecting both public and private photos
- Anything else required to have a fully functional dating website
Features that have not yet been implemented
- Facebook integration
- Mobile apps to integrate with the backend database
- Video conferencing (partially implemented, but not finished)
- Improved chat (ie. a chat that is not polling based)
Kind Regards
Alexander Marquardt