Pinterest clone

This page contains information about building Pinterest clone website with Elgg, free and open source framework for  building social networks.

Pinterest is social network and media sharing website. Users can share different types of media content like images and videos.  Content is shared by pining content to boards. Boards are user created topic pages where user can pin content.  Content can be added by uploading or sharing link to content on the Internet. User have to be registered to share content. Important difference comparing to previous social bookmark and sharing website is visual aspect of Pinterest. User can find picture of something he like and pin it boards, that picture is more important than title. On the other side, sharing sites like Reddit and digg are more focused on content title than image.

It is not hard to find good pinterest clone script, with growth in pinterest popularity a lot of clone scripts were released. There are stand-alone pinterest clone scripts and plugins for cloning pinterest on top of open source content management systems like Drupal, Wordpress or Joomla. Most of this scripts are premium and it's hard to find good free and open source solution. In this article I will link to Elgg plugins that can be used in building pinterest clone. Elgg is framework for building community websites, out of the box you get user profiles, users following,  activity page and other functionalities characteristic for community websites. We just need third party plugins for pinterest specific stuff like boards and pins.

Pugins:

AU Sets (Pinboards) for Elgg 1.8

Au Sets (Pinboards) elgg plugin wont make complete pinterest clone but will give you basic functionality as a good starting point for building pinterest.com clone. Pinboards are user created pages/boards  where user can pin content from elgg website. Currently, the only way to pin content outside of elgg website is by creating bookmark and then pining that bookmark to chosen pinboard. You need to enable elgg core bookmark plugin.

Pinboard can be created by any logged in elgg user with options to chose layout, access and edit rights. After creating pinboard user chose wich widgets to place on pinboard page.