Social Network HELP!

[mrlol1]

Hi,

 

I'm a bit of a newbie when it comes to PHP. I'm a thirs year music/music tech student and for my disseration I took a very ambitious task. I want to create a sort of social networking site for musicians. But I wanted to create it dynamically using PHP and MySQL. I want to basically allow users to register and sign up with their details basically. But the first problem I came across was actually making a custom registration page,  I wanted things such as post codes (zip codes) so that I would then have a Google Maps overlay showing where users were. So that you could 'see' you local music 'scene'.

So far I've been playing around with Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. I tried writing the PHP from scratch but after following various tutorials, but I had no luck what-so-ever with that approach. So I started using content management systems, which got me a lot closer, but I found I couldn't really edit custom registration pages etc. And the I would have no idea how to get the Google maps idea working.

If anyone could nudge me in the right direction and give me a few tips and ideas as to how I'm most likely to achieve this then please reply, I would be highly grateful for you responses.

 

Thanks,

 

Ewan Valentine.

[trq]

There's probably not much to say accept that you obviously need to learn php before you start projects, especially something like what your describing. Once you know the language you can simply design and then develop your application over time.

[OldWest]

There are dozens of open source social network apps which you could use as a foundation.. Get something up and running, and modify it as you learn the language.

 

Check this page for a few popular ones:

http://mashable.com/2007/07/25/open-source-social-platforms/

 

I would recommend NOT reinventing the wheel.