How hard would it be to create my own PHP script for a social networking site?

Question

I have to do a year long project for school next year and I was thinking about creating a social networking site. I would like to do this with PHP but if a different language would be better please tell me. I am fluent in HTML & CSS and am a very quick learner. I've done a little bit with PHP, but I am far from being an expert. Would it be unreasonable to think that I could create a social networking site in the next year? I do not want to use an existing script because that would be too easy. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

If you aren't very experienced with PHP *and a database backend*, don't expect to be able to create something as complex as a social networking website, despite any XHTML/CSS experience you have.  You'll need to be able to manipulate database backends such as MySQL in addition to getting the raw PHP going.  There are also other things that have to be handled outside of just presenting web pages to users which you will need to deal with, such as email notifications when new messages or friend requests arrive.

In short, you can probably get enough going to build some kind of rudimentary framework of a very basic site within a year, but it is quite unlikely that you will have the time and experience to make anything remotely polished and relatively bug-free by then, especially if you haven't done anything with SQL before.

Answer 2

Daiv is right.  My advice, whether you like it or not, would be to get one of the free ones and spend your time working on the design, perhaps attempt to get into some of the PHP (make sure you backup first!) and make slight modifications and addons.  Spend your time perfecting the look and feel of it.