neuralnoise / zino

A social network

Zino

Zino is a greek social network for teenagers developed from 2004 till today.

History

It started as a personal project, by Dionysis Zindros who used the code name of Chit-Chat for it. It was initially a piece of software to deepen my knowledge in web technologies. The first version was completed and released in 2 weeks and evolved into a small community of friends who gathered to discuss latest news, suggestions and commentary in books, cinema, movies and politics.

It slowly gained popularity and became a place for teenagers to discuss about news and share opinions in anything. While initially it had a closed circle of contributors, it was opened to public contribution eventually. Turning from news- and article-centered to discussion centered, it became a more interactive place to participate and discuss all subjects from personal matters and hobbies to religion, love, and politics.

It was later rebranded as Zino and modified to be more user-centered than disucssion-centered. The most prominent version of the website was version Phoenix.

Since its conception, Zino has had over 19,000 members.

Team

The founders of Zino are:

• Dionysis Zindros ([email protected])
• Chris Pappas ([email protected])
• Aleksis Brezas ([email protected])

Contributors are:

• Giorgos Panagiotakos ([email protected])
• Kostis Roussopoulos ([email protected])
• Petros Aggelatos ([email protected])
• Theodosis Sourgounis ([email protected])
• Alex Tzo ([email protected])
• Christian Herrmann ([email protected])
• Makis Kanavidis ([email protected])
• Dionysis Pantazopoulos ([email protected])
• Eleni Lixourioti ([email protected])
• Aristotelis Mikropoulos ([email protected])
• Dimitris Karagasidis ([email protected])
• Aggelos Orfanakos ([email protected])
• Themis Papameletiou ([email protected])
• Mario Saldinger ([email protected])

License

In 2012, Dionysis made Zino open source in order to help its further development and share the technical know-how and research and development findings we have accomondated through the years.

The Zino source code is licensed under the MIT license:

Copyright (C) 2004 - 2012 Dionysis Zindros ([email protected]) and the Zino Development Team

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Technology

We believe most of the source code of Zino is of exceptional software design quality. It is a prime example of good code organization and software architecture using traditional as well as state-of-the-art techniques. The code is generally fast, scalable, and most importantly extensible and maintainable. We hope publication of this source code will help advance the field of web development using the technologies we have used.

Most of the code is in PHP. The programming languages used for this project are HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, C++, XML, XSLT and XPath.