In reply of: http://groups.drupal.org/node/47324. I wanted to state that i just found and joined this group and am planning on getting a awesome drupal dating website out in the web.
Found a couple of topics on drupal.org forums and the web about dating websites build upon drupal but 98% returned a 404, so no inspiration from there.
Must say that the dating website I'm building a.t.m. is quite different than what people are used to so we'll have to wait and see if people are interested in this kind of dating process.
I can not supply a url at this time since it is still in early development, but i am planning to update this topic on a regular base as a kind of diary. Just to give an idea of what i already have done in drupal, here's a community project: http://bit.ly/523Af7. Dutch so most won't be able to read it (google translate?), but it will give some impression.
Tomorrow i will publish a modules list, of the modules installed at this time, maybe some will be dropped and probably a lot will be added.
If someone got idea's or tips or anything that might help, let me know!
Comments
Hello, Dating sites with
Hello,
Dating sites with Drupal, to me, are a good experience until you have a reasonable flow of users. Why ?
Mainly because of the administration efficiency. Drupal is not very fast with auth-centric sites, and administration does not fit the needs of a dating site. You will need to administer profiles, validate them before publishing them, or moderate them. You will need filters and good monitoring screens, you will then need to code a lot on top of Views.
The worst for me was custom control on visitor IP or searching in messages for flagged users. It was slow and needed many clicks for a single operation on one user. It was long.
The site was a full Drupal 6 : Site de rencontre and has been for 18 months. If you need tips just tell me.
Well, just to say hat Drupal is good for the first two years of a dating site project, then I warmly recommend a custom website. The main difficulty would then be exporting your Drupal data, but it's feasible.
Don't have wrong expectations of Drupal
Dating sites, just like any other web project, can be done in Drupal in many different ways. Drupal as a CMS gives you a basic core framework of users/security/url handing/etc .. but in addition also has the contributed modules for many general use case & even some custom solutions.
Any real website of consequence that incorporates complex user interactions, automations and other custom needs is do'able in Drupal with core + contrib modules + some custom coding (need developer level knowledge) and it is not so difficult to custom interact with drupal's core and contrib modules. The best a CMS can do is give you a solid architecture to be able to drive custom solutions and drupal gets you there.
Your last para is a bit confusing, at least to me.
Not sure if you are recommending to someone to jump ship from Drupal after 2 yrs due to need for more customization OR due to scalability/design/architecture/framework/programming language change completely. If the latter, then you'd have been better off starting on that framework to begin with. Even here if you think some functions are too expensive, change some code paths to use your custom functions (make clear comments if it is not doable with the drupal supported hooks-so during upgrades you can identify the custom forks).
But if it's for more customization, you don't need to jump ship, just need to work on the customization. Never build from scratch if you don't have to ..Of course, you need developer level knowledge, but anyone thinking of coding a custom web project from scratch will need to be a developer anyway. So why should anyone want to sacrifice the core functions which are widely tested by a huge community (think security!!) and will be needed for most/any websites.