SocialEngine 1.5 Released, Subnetworks Explained

SocialEngine - Community Software

Charlotte and I are excited to announce the release of SocialEngine 1.5. For those of you running into
trouble with subnetworks, your salvation is here. We’ve simplified the subnetworks admin area and fixed
the logic so that users are now properly sorted depending on their profile information.

So how do subnetworks work anyway? Subnetworks are one of the features that truly set SocialEngine
apart from its competitors. As the admin, you can create “subnetwork rules” which determine how your users
are sorted. For example, if you wanted to sort your users by age, you could create the following rules:

Subnetwork #1: Users under 18 years old

Subnetwork Rule: Age < 18 Subnetwork #2: Users over 18 years old
Subnetwork Rule: Age > 18

If you want to take this more in depth and split users based on several criteria (e.g. age and gender), you
could use the following rules:

Subnetwork #1: Men under 18 years old

Subnetwork Rule: Age < 18 and Gender == Male Subnetwork #2: Men over 18 years old
Subnetwork Rule: Age > 18 and Gender == Male

Subnetwork #3: Women under 18 years old

Subnetwork Rule: Age < 18 and Gender == Female Subnetwork #4: Women over 18 years old
Subnetwork Rule: Age > 18 and Gender == Female

A lot of people have asked us, “how do I show ads to a specific subnetwork?”
When a user is logged in, the header.php file sets a variable named {$user_subnetwork}.
This variable contains the name of the subnetwork the user belongs to. Using the example above, if
you want to show a specific ad only to “Women over 18 years old” on the top of every page, you could
add something like this to the header.tpl template file:

{if $user_subnetwork == “Women over 18 years old”}

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