Date: 08/26/06 (PHP Community)    Keywords: php, web

Hello all. This is my first post to the community. I was recently offered the opportunity to develop a social networking website. The site is already functioning, but the owners (a print shop) are interested in a complete revamp, which likely will be required since the current site was developed by less experienced programmers. I will likely use a framework such as Cake, or Zend.

The site will offer the users personal profiles, the ability to "friend" one another, upload photos, write blogs, send messages to one another, review restaurants and hotels, and plot travel itineraries with the intention of getting advice from fellow travelers and possibly meeting up. It currently services less than 3000 users, but due to a book tie-in to be released early next year, it has the potential to be very high traffic. It's a large project, and one that I'm excited to be a part of.

Now to my questions. If any of you were presented with this size of a project, what would your time estimate be? Also, given the amount of work to be done, and the four month timeframe, how much would you charge? Would you charge per project, or per hour? I'm in the San Francisco area if that has any influence on the outcome.

The second question is; which framework/libraries would you use? I'm leaning toward Cake because I am a fan of MVC and Design Patterns, but I'm also attracted to Zend and Prado because of their modularity meaning I could reuse components that other people have written to speed development. Does anyone have any thoughts on these?

Anyway, thanks in advance for your comments. I look forward to being an active part of this community as I transition into full-time php coding on this project.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/php/488887.html