A Serious Dating Site built using Drupal

I recently launched a serious dating site called NOTforPlayers.com. Since I had dependency on a lot of the modules which were not released in Drupal 6 at the time when I had started it, this is still a Drupal 5 site.

Dating Niche and Features

I have seen enough dating sites out there promoting flings and casual or married type dating which promote affairs to married people. I personally dislike such sites that do not take the moral high ground in love and relationships, and thus it formed the basis for NOTforPlayers.com which caters to only those looking for long-term relationships. I guess one say that it is a value based niche that I am trying to pitch.

There is also a niche custom feature for exclusivity in online dating , which I will get to later, but let me quickly mention some of the drupal modules being used for this site.

Modules Used

(1) User Registration and Profile creation as nodes (used nodeprofile with cck)

(2) Profile page display (using Contemplate module)

(3) Thumbnail and Profile Page Display Image Presets (using Imagecache)

(4) Image Watermark (using Imagecache Actions)

(5) User Messaging (Privatemsg)

(6) Showing exclusive interest in dating (Buddylist)

(7) Add to Favorites (using Favorite Nodes)

(8) Profile approval and moderation (using modr8)

(9) Profile Revision approval (using Revision Moderation)

(10) Date Search (using Views and Views Filter Block)

(11) Report Abuse or Inappropriate content (using Abuse)

(12) Automatic pruning of curse and obscene words from all node content including comments (using Wordfilter)

(13) Forum (Drupal Forum)

These are the major modules that enable the features / functionality for the online dating site. Of course, there are other modules such as Global Redirect, Pathauto, Captcha, Token, Google Analytics, etc. that I would make part of any other site.

A Niche Feature

I wanted to build a niche around those date seekers who are looking for long-term relationship. Also as the name of the site suggests it is NOT for Players type ;). Besides just laying out the text as a selling point in the "introduction" and "about us" pages, there is an additional feature that promotes the Long-Term Relationship / NOTforPlayers theme.

That is the Exclusive Dating feature. What this does is ensures that once two date seekers are already pursuing each other seriously that they are not engaging in side conversations with other members at the same time.

In order for this feature to take effect, there is some heavy customization of the buddylist and the privatemsg module which won't be easy to share. Basically what I did at a high level is create a custom module and build a bunch of functions that verifies users' dating status to check whether they are in a private bond or not. If they are, they cannot private message or flirt with anyone else. These functions are called from some key code points in buddylist and privatemsg module using hooks whenever possible. If I could not do it via hooks I had to resort to a forked call to the function in the custom module using a global variable check (to see if it is enabled or not), so the alternate logic is only used for this site, but the same module code can be used for other sites without affecting the original logic.

Conclusion

I am planning on upgrading this site to Drupal 6, but maybe a while.

Unfortunately most features cannot be tested without becoming a member, but since this is a production site, please do not become a member for the sake of experimenting with the features. If you have a question, feel free to send me a note and I will try and answer to the best of my ability. Thanks.