I posted this on the mambo-server forums and was directed here as the best solution.....

Okay, I want to build a small community website. I plan to have about a dozen members to start, eventually up to a hundred or more.

The main page will have a few banners, info on joining, and links to community features like a chat room and message board. It also has a search member sites portion that lets you pick from features (like birthday, zodiac sign, age, last name, hobbys, location, etc.) and display a list of the members that match most or all of your criterea.

Say it is "www.mysite.com", each member has a site name "john.mysite.com" or "mary.mysite.com". If I have to go with "mysite.com/john" I can, but I would prefer subdomains to directories for several reasons.

Their information is stored in a database, to make the above search'sort easy. When you type in or click a link to one of the subdomains, it is a basic template site (1 page) with the info from the database - a simple user profile.

They will also each have their own image gallery on a second page (john.mysite.com/gallery/), which they can add to or change at any time (only the user whose site it is; mary can't edit john's gallery, but john can).

There will be two levels of members - free members who get access to search the database and chat in the chatroom and forums, and paid members who get their own subdomain with an info page and gallery. Maybe a private forum for paid members too, but that is something I can deal with later.

That's pretty much it. There will be tons of other features I want to add later, but for now that's all I want to make sure Mambo (and community builder) can do, and get help on implementing it all.

Thanks!

The domains will be quite tricky to do, and the search functionality is not ready. Otherwise all this can be done.

For the domains and custom urls, you most likely need to do (or pay someone else to do) some custom coding.

Try posting this to www.joomlancers.com

mikko

If I used directories instead of domains, like "www.mysite.com/john" would it be doable now? Also, the searcj functionality is going to be one of the key features... is that something being worked on now, or is there a way I could somehow get it implemented?

Thanks!

Search needs to be coded first. There are some hacks in development, I recommend taking a look at the forums to see the status. But nothing production level ready yet, I suppose.

If you are willing to put some money in to hire someone to develop search, put a private message to achintya.

The directories can be done. There are some threads about this as well. Basically, all custom url-things require you to play a bit with url rewriting of apache.

-Mikko