meetup .com CLONE?

Does anyone know how I can get a website like meetup .com developed??

Is elgg a good way to go? Are you really familiar with meetup .com??

Any other recommendations?  Trying to clone that website, plus a couple more features, and minus a couple of their features...

  • Definitely you can use Elgg for that. But Elgg is just a frame work only. There are many basic event plugins available for you. But if you are looking for a quality, professional quality replica of MeetUp, it needs a major development with Elgg. Your solutions are to get familiar with Elgg plugins, architecture etc or hire a dev.

  • Yes, Elgg is definitely good to clone meetup.com. You would need some time to do this, I would estimate experienced developer would need approx. 300 hours to create a well designed and user friendly Meetup clone.. If you need just a prototype, it would take a fraction of this time.

  • lolz ;) Are you joking ?? this is everyone's dream.. We all want have a website '..just like facebook' ;-P Do you know that meetup.com have got abt 50 people on their *team ? How many hours and how many $$ do you guess they have invested into that website ? of course 'technically' Elgg can do the job, but the real question is gonna be - Can you do what they have used such a large team and several heavy $investors to achieve ? Why don't you create your own style of website that others will want to clone ? ;-P

  • Dhrup, it's all about traffic. If you want to create a website to support 20k-200k users that works like meetup.com, it's 300 hours for experienced dev. When you want to support more and pay less for servers, this is where you have to spend more time - and yes, it can be done with Elgg as well, but it has to be custom modified. This is usually when you have sponsors though.

  • Hecksszz ;o Yes ! Mikey Vazco.. ;-oO U R so RITGHTTT ! - it is all about traffic. Just ask the owners of FBFK ;-) BTW =- do you yourself also run and manage a Live Elgg *llarge *Social Site on-the-side when u r not developing plugins..?

  • Dhrup, please check this article. We focus on development of high-traffic Elgg websites.

  • @Mike, Interesting article. Have ye modified large chunks of elgg core? How much does this software retail at?

  • Mark, we don't retail this software yet, it's rather a set of technologies and tools that we use when developing new projects. We didn't modify core much, it's mostly on top of the core. It comes for free, with use of our services. It's not yet mature enought to release as a standalone product. We're still tuning and tweaking a lot of the code with new projects. So far it took over 2500 dev hours :) It's possible we may release this technology as a standalone plugin/mod at some point, although due to complexity rather not in a close future.

    We already proposed some of the modifications to core team though and it's possible they will appear in a new version of Elgg. Also, a plugin that does a very simple but effective tweak to search optimization is available here.

  • I would buy that plugin if you released it:) sounds fantastic.

    The vasco_cache_metadata really interesting plugin. I will look through it. On our site, we will have to filter searches by longtiude and latitude, as in show results with latitude between x and y and longitude between a and b, as well as checking for matches in title and description with the seach term. I'm currently working on this and am adapting Evan's Sphinx plugin. With sphinx, you can filter by range of values. Sounds like we are using 2 different approaches to same problem:)