First of all I would like to take a moment to thank you all for having a very civil discussion about the topic of community scripts. I’ve been pouring over various forums the last couple of days before finding you guys and reading 15 pages of posts. By far you guys are the best in terms of staying on topic and not going after one another.
Thanks from a newbie to the “world” of community scripts.
Kat, I am extremely interested to know what you conclusions you came to regarding popsugar after having taken a very close look at it.
I am in the midst of of working with a programmer to develop a very similar styled site that is a combination of entertainment and community and I would appreciate any thoughts you have on it.
Side note: in a recent article on blogging in Business 2.0 it was reported that popsugar was founded with $250,000. I don’t know how much of that went into the scripts but I am curious to know as developers how much you all think went into popsugars’ scripts when I’ve been reading from many of you that for a couple of grand a person could have a really good customized script created from scratch.
IIRC popsugar is part of network of 3-4 related sites including a fair bit of original content so that figure might refer to all of them. I assume there would have been some promotional costs, advertising in print media and that kind of thing included in that cost as well. They are going after a really fickle demographic so getting them there is probobly harder than making the script.
iv read this forum and after a severe headache am none the wiser as to which 1 wins.
BUT… i have just found a dating software with sns which looks amazing with live sites such as www.stripperhire.com. the software is called emeeting can be found at www.datingscripts.co.uk.
it looks smooth and at £79 not bad. but i am no a programmer so if any1 with the expertice could check it out and let me know. perhaps i can finally start my million pound business!!!
A superb find. Thank you for your great post in addition to the above.
I’ve come to the conclusion that drupal is still close to where I thought it was a long time ago. Yes, it does have a number of great features that make it an excellent publishing platform and certainly superior in several ways over other software. HOWEVER, I’ve also realized that you must have a significant amount of money to invest to make drupal look snappy and adding all the bells and whistles. Drupal is not a great place to begin a social community network, IMHO, and is probably more of a publishing system. I don’t know that there is a good reason to create these add-ons for software that will primarily be used as a publishing platform, thus building the site would be an individual investment borne solely by yourself.
so, as we now approach mid January 2007, and this whole topic has been discussed in wonderfully fine detail (for a couple of years - when you add in that other long running thread), are we any closer to coming up with a solution?
I have looked at a load of scripts over the past year or two…at present I’m focussed on datemill and possibly osdate (which I am tweaking at on a private demo site these past few weeks)
What about the matter of picture resizing? What’s the best PHP code to get users’ uploaded photos below 5 KB even if they start out in the 100’s of KB? I was visiting some sites earlier and was surprised to find the photos well below 5 KB, so I suppose this shouldn’t be a problem. Are any of the scripts already doing an excellent job with this?
Also, how about the ability to click on a profile photo and have it expand in its own window? Any of them have that?
As far as I know there’s no way to determine the size of a file on the visitor’s computer BEFORE uploading it to the server. However, once on the server a script can check its size, its type, resize it, delete it, etc.
So after the actual upload and before putting it on site, a script has the choice of rejecting a photo based on the size.
This is integrated by default in our new and very-very-late application (you can specify a minimum and a maximum file size) and it can be done with a little mod in the current application.
In the new one you can also set the maximum width of the picture.
I don’t think this is the proper thread to discuss about this so I’ll try to be short:
As a future dating site owner all you can do is to ensure that there’s more behind a dating script than a nice and fluffy interface. That’s what discussions like this one and people like Slinky, who share their opinions on what they find, are good for.
That’s it, that’s all you can do before buying.
After you have your site you need to supervise the members and their content (including their posts and profile answers). This will prevent most of the problems but if the application is buggy you might not be able to see what a joe_the_hacker is doing.
As developers there are tons of things we could do, but all are related to quality of coding and experience. We must ensure that the uploaded files are indeed video and audio files and not some .exe file, we must ensure that a member can’t post links to another site which has viruses so other members would click on that link and get infected, we must ensure that everything that comes from a user goes to the right place and in the right format and so on.
I know image dimensions are important, but I’m most concerned about file size, especially after finding a few sites where I could find nothing but images less than 5 KB, which surprised me. For one of them I know which script it is, although I know it’s also been modified. I don’t even want to allow 20 to 40 KB if I can avoid it, but would like to be able to shrink anything in a range like that or higher if possible rather than reject a photo. I don’t mind if I wind up needing 100’s of GB in space, but would like to able to use it well.
Yes, all links are about the image resizing functions available in php.
As I said in a post below, there’s a moment after the picture upload is complete and before the script saves it for use in the site when it is possible to manipulate the picture (including to resize it). That’s what the thumbnailer addon does for Dating Site Builder (and by default in the upcoming app).
The difference between the 2 apps is that the thumbnailer only creates a thumbnail image for the original image and uses it all over the site until you click on the thumbnail and a popup with the full size image is displayed. In the new app we made it so it resizes the original image too down to a size you like.
Of course, the thumbnailer in the current app can be made to resize the original photo too but with another small patch.
Kat is the local Drupal junkie. No question the resource for everything Drupal and also has put up a few nice sites if you haven’t yet peeked.
I’ve decided to go a completely different route. Here’s my take. I’ve had it with PHPFox. Supposedly the new 1.5.1 version is going to be released last Monday (did that make sense? lol) and even with those versions it isn’t compelling. I haven’t yet looked at the themes section but the 20 new free themes all suffer from the same horrific instantly recognizable look and feel that the prior version did.
Drupal - lots of promise and some superb features that make it the best pure publishing solution out there. Unfortunately IMHO to get to the level you see in the lists above it requires a significant outlay of cash. There also aren’t a ton of resources out there to get what you want done quickly, e.g. high quality plugins.
I’m using a bunch of different scripts that integrate with each other to some degree and putting together my own. Total cost of the scripts (vbulletin and others) and added plugins comes out to roughly $500, which I find acceptable. That’s a lot of functionality and a nice look in one package. Some of the other stuff will cost me in development but at least I’m going somewhere and not waiting for a mediocre package to continue to move forward slowly. Honestly, I haven’t seen many active PHPFox sites - those with many memberships yes, but not active members. I think it may say something about the software too. But that is just IMHO.
Kat, the phpfox forums have been virtually down for the past 3 days due to “unforeseen maintenance on the server.” It doesn’t say much for a company that has problems like that and the latest release already has 1 patch and few can install it properly. I want to say great things about it but a stable version that I think is a worthwhile venture (beyond 1.1) is several months away at best unfortunately. I’ve also heard that it was sold and purchased by a new company that will be getting rid of the current dev team and putting in a new one. Mixed blessing but it will take time for them to figure out what is going on. Just don’t expect to invest in something that works well right out of the box. It will be a while…
No question the resource for everything Drupal and also has put up a few nice sites if you haven’t yet peeked.