The project is to build a Facebook-like social networking site (SNS).
Features:
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- A customizable home page (users simply drag homepage items around like in google homepage, choose colors, sections, etc)
- Email messaging with search and sort capabilities.
- Games facility and game content including eg Texas-Hold-Em.
- Other basic SNS site features such as events, groups, user-search, music/video/blog sharing etc.
- CMS managed multi-dimensional rating system.
Eg, the site admins would be able to add a rating field such as a 10-star general rating to any user-created-content item, or a 10-star "funny" rating to any such item.
Users would be able to search for various user-created-content by any such rating field.
Technical:
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Preferably, the site would be built using LAMP or other cost effective platform in terms of up front costs and long-term scalability and performance.
Open source software can be used as long as the licenses do not impede profit in any way. GPL licenses such as that of Drupal are not acceptable as they would require the release of all our proprietary project code. MIT-like, or completely free (even for commercial reuse) licenses may be acceptable however.
A content management system (CMS) should allow easy updates for advertisement and other often changing site-created content.
The code's logic should be separated from the presentation layer so that skins can easily be applied in eg CSS.
The code should be modular for ease of maintenance and modification and with scalability and performance in mind.
Per-visitor bandwidth and computation requirement estimates should be made and used in forming decisions about eg database configuration and scalability.