fokk.hu social networking portal

The fokk.hu community portal is one of our latest and most complex projects - and we're proud of it. We've made our best to fulfil the needs of the visitors, this philosophy led us from the very first moment.

Being a new player in the race of community portals we've raised the limits: the portal has very wide range of features, including several rarely used fancy ones.

In the target audience are 18-30 years old young adults, being active internet users, most of them holding some degree. As these visitors already got used to the features of the internet during their education, we've decided to armor the site with features of such user level, and to keep their interest by adding new features continously.

To win the visitors we've introduced a very high level graphic design. Building a site with such design is a tough challenge, where providing maximum accessibility is a concern: we've spent many time to make fokk.hu compatible with Internet Explorer 6, which is still in use by many visitors despite the fact that it was made in 2001 (!) and is full of bugs.

There are even complex though still easy-to-use features in fokk.hu, handling groups being the largest. The group feature provides a perfect infrastructure for entire communities to meet, share and interact.

The portal introduces loads of up-to-date technologies:

• Besides sitebuild (XHTML/CSS) tasks we've taken care of optimizing raw content delivery too, as high traffic services cannot afford unnecessary traffic between the server and the browser. The pages are delivered in compressed form using the least possible HTTP connections: the JavaScript and CSS files are combined, compressed, have version-based filenames, expiration dates and ETags set, while static files (like photos or other images) have expiration dates and version-based filenames.
• The portal features a full featured inviting subsystem integrating the following online services: gmail.com, MSN Messenger and the most important local ones - iWiW, freemail.hu, indamail.hu, citromail.hu. The downloaded contact details are used to send invitations by the users themselves to increase the number of their friends.
• To build the city list and provide location maps the site integrates Google Maps (extensible Address Language), Yahoo Maps Web Services and geonames.org.
• The site introduces lots of controls, techniques and best practice solutions to help the visitors. Most of them are provided as unobstrusive JavaScript (where possible), based on the industry standard prototype.js and mootools libraries:
  • all the paginated listing interfaces on the site work fine using both with and without AJAX, page links are in an unordered list with an appropriate microformat.
  • a detailed friend search form with an accordion feature to keep its size compact
  • upload many images in one turn, drag and drop image reordering, loading conversion status using AJAX
  • the fisheye calendar in the program guide is not only a nice eyecandy but a helping feature to get an overview of the programs
  • date- and time selector component in forms
  • customized BSN AutoSuggest helps finding cities and locations
  • FCKEditor based BBCode editor area with own plugins for creating any kind of rich contents (like blogposts, comments, forum posts, etc.)
• embedded True Type fonts using cufón technology (VML/Canvas), previously used sIFR
• automatic video embedding for YouTube and similar video sharing services
• automatic mp3 player embedding for mp3 links (anarchy media player)
• the site is supported by a number of processes in the background providing data processing, statistics, system maintenance and monitoring.
• the portal can be translated to virtually any number of languages