My experience with UNA for 2 years!

Hello everyone,

I would like to share my experience with UNA since I discovered it 2 years ago...
First of all I am not a professional developer actually I am a medical doctor with hobby level IT skills.
How I find UNA?
I was desperately looking for a community infrastructure and looking at gg search for a candidate.
Everyday I found a few platforms and install them but at the end of the day nooo they were not suiting my broad needs.

Custom development always as an option needed hundreds of thousands to invest... was impossible...

Then I found Dolphin, then UNA, I have to admit that I didnt know that they belong to the same company :)
After digging hopelessly with many community suites, this 2 seemed like the best ones covering my needs.
I wrote to them, Andrew responded and he recommended to start with UNA instead of Dolphin.
(At only that moment I understand that they are steps of evolution of the same software :)) )

So I started to learn UNA system in August 2018.

How my site developed?

Mine is a community portal for doctors.
After several months of beta site with the first stable release of UNA, I started the production site.
During this almost 2 years I noticed that UNA's infrastructed is very solid very reliable. And even for a non professional like me it gives possibilities to develop a comprehensive site.

At the end, on the Corona peak days, my site reached to 200+ online visitors on Google analytics which I guess a very good number.
And yes the server and UNA as software show no weakness to handle this much instant visitors.

I will write down what I did till now to develop the site to give opinions and and encourage the new beginners:

• I use almost all standart and professional plan features of UNa actively
• Horde web mail integration to UNA, one click auto login to horde with UNA user
• Rainloop web mail integration to UNA (currently using this as horde has problems with Turkish language)
• Showing number of new emails with every minute updates near the email icon at UNA site.
• Automatic web sites for selected users which is syncronised from users UNA profile
• SEO with structured data+SEO friendly URLs, provides our members articles to be in the first pages of google searches, location wise.
• Google Maps integration to users professional profiles
• Weather broadcast block sensitive to users location or users selection
• 
• Share to groups function: you may share timeline posts to multiple UNA groups at once
• Medical Conferences block and page sensitive to users' medical specialization and optional areas of interest (in development). This is integrated to UNA events module.
• Referal system integrated with points module (in development)
• Facebook profile import (in development)
• Share to social media (AQBsoft)
• Dark mode for Lucid also customized for UNA app
• Sitemagic CMS integration to UNA for free web sites for Family Medicine Centers (now we have 100+ web sites)
• nowadays as my experience increased I started to use the existing UNA functions (there are tons of them ready to ease your codes) and UNA CSS.
• text overlay to every video posted through UNA videos module
• and many more that I can not remember now

After 2 years how is my opinion about UNA?

Yes I selected the right infrastructure.
As a non professional even I can customize it easily because code is modular, easy to understand, database is super structured. Most things I did in my spare time.

One of the best features of UNA for me is, it is very consistent, there are no surprises, once you understand it deeply the limit is your imagination.

So I encourage everybody to try and invest on their sites with UNA. The UNA ecosystem is well enough for a production site now and everday developing more...

I would like to thank to LeonidS  Alex T⚜️  and AQB Soft  Alexey  Alexander Anton and all UNA team for their continuous help in my technical questions, allowing me to understand UNA system deeply.

And to Andrew Boon Alex T⚜️   Mark Purser it is yours' bright imagination and hardwork letting us to use such a nice infrastructure ♥️