is there a thread or area where you can show off your page, maybe talk a little about it, what plugins and themes you are using, etc....

I'd love to see how people are developing final products of their pages. Im slowly crawling through mine and i'd like to see the ideas out there

Getting good and bad feedback from people would help us all develop better products.

I couldn't agree more. That's an excellent suggestion!

I don't have a page to show you at the moment, but I can tell you some of the products which have helped me in gaining a solid community foundation.

Absolute plugin must haves are two by Radcodes. RSSfeeds and Seo Sitemaps.

The RSS feeds are outbound as well as inbound. So you can export your latest blogs, forums, or whatever channels you setup to a feed and display it somewhere. This you have to setup manually via layout editor on the pages you want, or through the header area where you could html link your XML feeds. But it's totally worth it. You can make them into site maps and also submit them to search engines. Along with, your actual SEO Sitemaps plugin from Radcodes.

The cool thing about this plugin, is that it pings search engines when ever a new page is added on a curl scheduler. So you can always have up to date posts, profiles and basically whatever pages Social Engine provides that you deem most important to make. I highly recommend them as I've used them both in the past for my own products.

Now here's the best part. I take things a step further with my RSS feeds, and link them up to Word Press via two very important areas. The first is called WPEMatico, which feeds in feeds of your choice and blogs them for you. And the second, is called XML Pingback writing services. This automatically tells search engines, and other blog directories, a new post or article was made. The more updates that get sent out, the higher your search engine rankings will be the more your xml ping list gets updated with sites. I do have a master list I'd be willing to give to you towards this if you like for a small fee. It's well worth it, and works in 2020.

SEO and blog techniques aside, the best plugins I always have used in Social Engine have come from core itself. Some of the later plugins I'd recommend would be CSV export and import plugins from Social Apps and or Ipragmatech or Social Networking Solutions. I forget who makes them, but the reason why I highly recommend them, is because you can make automatic members that way using names, email addresses and other important information if you want to migrate an existing community. If nothing else, you'll at least be able to start with notifications, and profiles. Though you may want to run such a list if you have one through a list cleaning service first to scrape away any dead emails.

I have high hopes for Social Engine version 6, though I don't know when it is coming out. I just know that it is in the works, reading a post on here from awhile ago that proves this made by Donna. So stay tuned for core improvements, as that's one of the key areas I'm looking forward to as well.

Honestly though, I would stay away from plugins that clutter up things. Some improvements made to core tend to prove my point for example the area where you now go and enter code for the social share plugin. That's in a main settings area used for a block found in the layout editor. Why not just add it in the block settings? Some of the theme changes are now spread out across different settings pages. Serenity for example has its own main menu area, dealing with mobile plugins that aren't even installed by default. So, not too sure about the placement for some of these key component areas Social Engine has made. I also don't like how cluttered the interface is for many of the advanced plugins, which is why I never use them. But yet some of the more simple plugins are too much so for the professional price tag, and I just haven't found a happy medium. Chat, and forums being classic examples of this.

So, stick with what works in core. If you absolutely need something for functionality reasons, go with a third party. But other than that, let core make it over time. It will be worth the wait when you do because you're saying in the long run, native support is always best. It's great while a new product idea is hot to support third party developers for something similar, but once it's in core, it's time for some key components to be shared between developers and core. Not to become stagnant for years. That's what we're here for, as a community to make a difference and talk to keep in touch with the developers who make our dreams a reality and profitable for everyone again and again. That's why I support ideas both paid and free to give the best experience possible during your time as a network administrator. Other projects don't have the same progressive drive, which is why they're riddled with bugs and Social Engine keeps upping its standards to help us continuously grow and reflect on the customers (us) who keep it alive to stay in the game, our game.