By Swooperz on

Hi All.

I have been developing websites with Drupal for almost 2 years now and absolutely love Drupal!

I have a client that has an outdated online dating service that wants a major overhaul and I am considering Drupal as the "driver" behind the improved online dating service.

But I wanted everyone's professional opinion and thoughts on if this could truly be achieved and if so, how?

Can Drupal provide the capabilities for the following features?
1. Capability to search for members based on any number of criteria such as an age range, miles from location range, male/female, interests, looking for friends/romantic relationship, etc.
2. Capability of showing search results of members found in a search with some brief details on each member and a single primary photo.
3. Capability to allow viewing of members' full profiles including all of their photos (up to 10), their interests (unlimited e.g. running, cycling, painting, drupalizing, etc)
4. Capability to send an anonymous email to the member
5. Capability to provide a 3rd party discussion board (Drupal forum is very limited so I want to use phpbb, invision, etc) for members and the ability to pass member login info to the forum without requiring a 2nd login.
6. Capability to require a login for certain features like emailing, viewing full profiles, posting and viewing forums, etc.
7. Capability to charge per period (per month, 3 months, 6 months) to member's credit card
8. An automated system in the background to run card renewals (I could probably use the current cron job now.)

I know list is a long list, but I truly need your help and expert advice on whether Drupal is a viable solution for this or if I should just stick to rewriting the php that it uses now.

Thanks SO MUCH for any feedback, insight, or help you can provide on this matter. Hey, maybe one day it will be in the Drupal showcase! :)

-Alan

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

Swooperz’s picture

Swooperz commented

Is it just me, or has the efforts of the community in responding to each others' questions (or pleas for help) subsided somewhat over the past year?

It seems like at least one person would reply to each post a year ago.

Come on people, what comes around goes around. If you don't help other Drupal developers, how can you expect help when you need it?

alliax’s picture

alliax commented

I need help right now and nobody is answering anything.. At the end of the day you're on your own.

I don't know Drupal enough but for online dating service, I would use drupal and then develop things that are not readily available, as for profile searching I don't think it exist, but maybe it does, you'l have plenty of module to look at.
But for only a dating site, maybe doing it all would be better for constitency, but having drupal as a base helps a lot, so I would go with it and then see how to do what I want.

Swooperz’s picture

Swooperz commented

Thanks for the reply alliax!

I will probably stick to creating it in php until I hear that someone has successfully created a dating or matchmaking service using Drupal only or a combination of Drupal and separate php pages.

Thanks again,
Alan

viva’s picture

viva commented

www.open-personals.com

(Let's consider the week 21-28 NOV 2006 as beta, shall we? any beta testers in the croud?)

Though this dating site is not "open-source" by definition, and the code is not available, it is by nature inspired by the open source idea. It is free. And it is based on the internet community for development and support.

Feel free to drop in. Feel free-er to sign up. And more than that - to assist. There are hips of things to do!

Viva!

fluitfries’s picture

fluitfries commented

perhaps making some of your code available would give us a reason to visit your site other than to wish that we knew how to code such things ourselves.

fluitfries’s picture

fluitfries commented

(I just typed a long response here and accidentally navigated away from the form. I lost the entire post, so forgive me if this is rather brief.)

The "search function" is an extremely popular request in the Drupal Community. There is no real stand-alone module type solution to this right now, although there are a smattering of modules being worked on that can be twisted into providing the functionality (so they claim).

I have seen that many drupalers and their clients would be willing to pay for the development of such a module, myself included.

I have just come across this site: http://www.asianlovers.net/
It seems to have accomplished the task but I am unsure if they would be willing to contribute it to the community. If not, I will be attempting to do something like rentacoder.com to have the function replicated, and hopefully it will be affordable enough for my client. If not, I will make a call to all others who need the function and we should be able to make it happen.

If anyone can offer assistance or advice on this much needed function, please do!

Thanks.

mtk’s picture

mtk commented

Hi,
I'm new to Drupal, but good enough with PHP.
I have a need of such a feature/module for a new site I'm working on.

I'm willing to help as much as needed...

Schoonzie’s picture

Schoonzie commented

I am also keen to see this through. Perhaps we should brainstorm a list of modules needed to suit a standard site like this.

I can program custom modules, and can also donate to get some written as well.

iandickson’s picture

iandickson commented

1 - VIEWS (filters)
2 - Flexinode/CCK - create an Advert Content Type
3 - Bio Content Type with nodeimageblock?
4- why? don't know if you can do.
5 - explore flat forum and some of the forum mods, drupal forums are better than they look!
6- Roles for functions, taxonomy access mods for content
7-8- explore e-commerce, but you may need another route if it doesn't do. I've not used in anger yet.

Ian Dickson - community specialist.
www.emint.org - Association of Online Community Professionals
www.iandickson.com/taxonomy/drupal/ - Taxonomy Server Project - generic, organic, standards compliant, directed graph using, ass-licking (maybe not) taxono

fluitfries’s picture

fluitfries commented

Thanks for your list iandickson. I am trying to use Views to accomplish the search feature, the solution you posted for item 1. I cannot figure out what Filter would be used to list the Users. I have profiles_module enabled already and I have user pages that have custom fields. I can see how Views might be able to do what you suggest, but I am unable to get it working using the options available. What's the trick?

Thanks!

iandickson’s picture

iandickson commented

Avoid the User stuff and create a suitable content tupe so that USER data can be entered as taxonomy. BIO is a good module for this.

One you have turned your selectors into taxonomy you can easily apply filters to them in Views.

Ian Dickson - community specialist.
www.emint.org - Association of Online Community Professionals
www.iandickson.com/taxonomy/drupal/ - Taxonomy Server Project - generic, organic, standards compliant, directed graph using, ass-kicking taxonomy:-)

gurukripa’s picture

gurukripa commented

pls share some more ideas on how to accomplish a good user page and a good search theme for it
thanks

mtk’s picture

mtk commented

Hi,
in my case I want to add a Dating Service as an extra feature in my site.
Which means a user in the site can:

  • be registered as a site user, but not be included among the Dating users.
    in this case, his profile should not be extended to a Dating profile.
  • be registered as a site user, and have one of the paid-membership-levels of the Dating system.
    in this case, his profile should be extended according to his membership (if any difference between them)

(important to mention, that there will be other profile extention modules, so it is importat to have such an extension method)

what do you say, possible?

gurukripa’s picture

gurukripa commented

do we have anything yet..i heard of a hotornot module..but cant see it..
someone pls help..it wld be nice to have dating features..
thanks

skullJ’s picture

skullJ commented

Is there any way to this idea be a drupal's 5 profile?