Need to add a facsimile "facebook" page to site!

talk random
1

Hi,

This may be a semi-off-topic question but I’ve gotten great feedback from kirupa forums before on weird requests, so I’ll try this.

I have a client who I’ve built a website for (mostly in Flash) that is a tribute to his pet dog.

Now he wants me to add a page to the site that would be a sort of stand-alone, ersatz facebook or myspace facsimile page, where doggie friends of his dog could: submit requests to become “friends,” post messages to his “wall,” etc. (Of course, the dogs being under-aged, their “mommies and daddies” really would be doing the submitting!)

I don’t know much about facebook or myspace type sites (a gap in my cultural armor!).

I’d like to do this, as much as possible, in Flash, because that’s what I’m most familiar with. I have done some semi-sophisticated pages in html/CSS elsewhere, however, and these facebook-type sites seem to have been done in html; so I suppose I could do it that way, to replicate that “look” – or in some combo of Flash and html/CSS.

I’m not asking here how to do this; I’m only seeking links to sites that might have tutorials for just such a page or something similar. I’d even be willing to pay for a template, if there are commercial sites that provide one.

TIA.

2

Facebook already has an application like that.

Its called Catbook and Dogbook… its an extensive facebook application and very well made.

3

^i think he wants something like that on his own site

4

If you don’t want to actually use Facebook for this, and you don’t know how to do it yourself, I think your best bet is to get a good freelancer to program it for you. Tutorials are good to learn with generally, but if you have something really specific like this, it might get messy trying to string together a bunch of tutorials to accomplish something complicated.

5

I went to drupal.

Looked interesting.

What’s the learning curve like? I’ll probably only need ever to do one of these!

6

Subcontract a coder.

7

Thanks for the suggestion. I might do that, but not yet. Not with a 3-day weekend ahead of me with nothing to do but… noodle!

My present thought is to find a template online (for free or about $50) that would be absolutely perfect – just as is.

Am I right in assuming that if were to avoid altogether tinkering with the structure of a prefabricated Drupal theme or template, I could perhaps intuit how to simply plug my esoteric info into that structure?

If so, can anyone suggest one that might befit a kind of facebook page for pets?