Our client needs to develop a website which functionality somewhat similar to Amazon's
It would have hotel services content instead of books, i.e.
- Hotel owners would upload hotel content
- Customers would search and review hotels
- Other customers would rate the reviews
- Customers select date/time of reservation for appropriate type of room.
- Keeping in mind the customers not turning up at scheduled time.
For now, we have selected Drupal as the implementation platform and need experienced resources in Drupal, to work with an existing technical/project leader based in India.
Is it feasible / appropriate to deploy Drupal as platform of choice and use contributed modules or for the above functionality we may need custom modules?
In case of hiring, what may be the expected rates and can it work with telecommuting developers.
Any suggestion on above is welcome.
Comments
ambitious
What you're asking for is ambitious to say the least. Sites like hotel.com have spent literally tens of millions of dollars developing their application and network. And that's not including all the millions of dollars on marketing.
That said, it should be possible to develop a light version of what you describe using a combination of popular third-party modules (CCK, Views, etc.) If you someday expect to achieve huge traffic then you'll want to keep things as "thin" as possible. You might want to eventually implement some of the features with custom modules that are optimized and tailored specifically for your application.
I would plan to invest 100-200 hours to get the core functionality in place and another 100-200 hours to refine everything. This assumes you've got everything spec'd in detail ahead of time otherwise double the amount of hours. Since you're located in India you might want to utilize domestic resources.
Good luck!
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