It depends on what you mean by 'use elgg' - if you're just wanting to set it up, drop in a few plugins and run with it then no php knowledge is really required.  To write custom plugins, you should probably be pretty well versed in php, and then spend some time learning the elgg model and dissecting some well written plugins to see how things are done.

Once you've learned that it's actually fairly easy.  Elgg was designed for rapid development, no need to mess with the database or add tables or anything.  The downside to that is the normalization of the database does make advanced searching harder.  Not impossible, but certainly harder.

I'm looking for the excact same thing, not for a dating site though, but also for a member seeks other member part of my site.
My community is almost ready, but is absolutely useless without a userfield search...

I was thinking of trying to modify the elgg search mod to get more parameters so that I could have a form provide an url like :www.mysite.com/search?job=cook&gender=man

It all seems fairly simple looking at the search mod, since it can search for tag=something and q=userfielddata,...but I can't do it...

I'm willing to pay for a plugin like this...

If anyone comes across an advanced search facility for Elgg, perhaps one that ties into the popular "Profile Manager" plugin that would be great.

I've rolled out an entire site, under the impression that Elgg had this facility, and then found out that the advanced search facility was taken out upon relase of Elgg 1.8. Disappointed doesn't even begin to describe how I feel at the moment :)

@AmmyKami83 Are you saying you're running Elgg 1.7 and the features were removed in 1.8?

No, I'm running Elgg 1.8 - and thats what I rolled out. But Profile Manager, when that was updated for 1.8, they removed the feature. I missed that detail out and now I'm stuffed :(

@AmmyKami83

I know if it is not a good solution but you could try Google Search plugin for elgg 1.8

Rodolfo Hernandez

Arvixe/Elgg Community Liaison

Do you know what version it was removed? Because you can download any old version they have in source control, or possibly have another developer fork it with that feature re-added.

@Steve I think it was removed since first 1.8 version

Rodolfo Hernandez

Arvixe/Elgg Community Liaison

@AmmyKami83

we removed the advanced search features from Profile Manager in the 1.8 release, because most of the search functions where implemented in core.

The only thing which you could miss is searching is a specific field.

@Steve Clay yeah, I was thinking about rolling back a couple of versions to when the feature was enabled and going from there.

@Jerome that's exaclty the feature I need - being able to search by extended field. Nevermind though, thanks for letting me know :)

@rjcalifornia Thanks, I'll check it out.

Thanks to all! :D