Myspace Clone Cms

[nuzurevue]

Hello,

I'm pretty clueless about web development past xhtml, css, and installatron. I am looking to setup a myspace type website for my church and I am not sure where to start.

I would like for our members to be able to WYSIWYG(can i use that as a verb?) their profile and pictures as well as stream live events and masses. Our budget is $500 for the entire website.

1. Are their any low cost software solutions to acheive this? Maybe Drupal?

2. What is learning curve?

3. Which hosting plan would be feasible to handle about 50-70 simultaneous live video streams?

A step by step guide would be nice, but I know that is asking for too much. So I will ask questions as they come to me.

Thanks a bunch,
Jen

[Sean]

3. Which hosting plan would be feasible to handle about 50-70 simultaneous live video streams?


It's called a dedicated server. The shared plans would not handle that kind of traffic.

[dbmasters]

50-70 simultaneous streams?!?! jeez...got big plans for loads of traffic eh...

IMHO if you have no clue about web development, trying to recreate MySpace for $500 is probably not a good place to start trying...

[Sean]

$50,000 might get you started though.

[webdesign]

Hey, I may be able to help.

You can visit my website at http://websitedesignstudio.net or e-mail me at webdesign@websitedesignstudio.net and I'm sure we can work out a much more reasonable price then $50,000. :)

Thanks,
Mohammad
Website Design Studio

[tnas]

Originally posted by nuzurevue@Feb 21 2006, 04:35 PM
......

3. Which hosting plan would be feasible to handle about 50-70 simultaneous live video streams?

.......
Jen

Quoted post


Jen, the money that you have will definitely handle the webhosting charges for a reasonable website, and yes, you can do the entire website yourself. There are many tools available, drupal being an excelent tool. There are web page creator tools at HostPC too. The reaction and the huge dollar figure given was in response to th "50-70 live video streams". This is a huge bandwidth resource needed. The comparison to MySpace which is also HUGE, having millions of users. If you are looking to create a webspace, have a picture or video gallery and share info through a forum then you are on the right track.

[Sean]

Well, considering that MySpace gets 220,000 new users register everday ( Approximately 5 million/month) and currently have 60 million registered users, yea, I'd say they are huge..lol. $175mill a year income from the homepage alone.

My point is that 50-70 live streams is not feasible on a shared hosting environment.

[dbmasters]

Also, 50-70 streams is a goal, I could with reasonable confidence guarantee that wouldn't happen quickly and shared hosting could work quite well during the development and traffic building stage of this project, and, if proven valuable and profitable, move up to bigger hosting.

[dchakrab]

Also, 50-70 streams is a goal, I could with reasonable confidence guarantee that wouldn't happen quickly and shared hosting could work quite well during the development and traffic building stage of this project, and, if proven valuable and profitable, move up to bigger hosting.
I second this.

Base Drupal install / config for this project ~$1k.

Customizing to include multimedia is where the budget's going to increase, because "multimedia" can mean a lot of different things. Drupal can handle basic image / video gallery management quite well.

Learning curve with Drupal is about as easy as it's going to be, but never totally simple for the newbie...there are a lot of things you're going to have to learn, no matter what. I've found the CivicSpace community very helpful, and learning a little HTML (necessary) and PHP (optional) isn't too hard.

When you say simultaneous, what do you mean, exactly? Most of us are understanding this to mean that you want that many clients watching video streams at the same time (like having 50 video streams, with 100 people logged in with two people watching each stream). If this is the case, are you *sure* you're going to have this kind of traffic, simultaneously? If so, you *are* going to need a bigger budget. $500 won't even cover your hosting costs for a year if this is the kind of traffic your site needs to support.

On the other hand, if you mean you want 50-70 streams available on the site, which users can pick and choose from, this is a completely different case. If your site traffic is low, then it could be quite some time before you're in need of a colo / dedicated server environment.

Also, consider your equipment and manpower. $500 won't go far towards covering camera costs for a decent video feed from a mass.

As with all nonprofit / church projects, you're going to have to compromise between what you can afford and what you want. I've found that the best way to approach this is to break down components of the project along with associated costs, and then have you decide what those components are worth and whether you can justify the budget for them. For $500, you could learn how to implement Drupal yourself, set it up, host it, and create a great community site with WYSIWYG editors, constituent relationship management (your Church will *love* this) and a ton of other features. Adding video clips, perhaps even one live video stream for ongoing events, might work as well. Adding image galleries would be cheaper / easier, and adding pre-recorded and re-optimized video for future downloads might work as well. Moving into multiple simultaneous video feeds is going to knock your budget through the roof if you actually get the kind of traffic you're hoping for...and if you don't, then there isn't much point in building the project in that direction.

Local businesses might be interested in sponsoring parts of your site, either for free or in exchange for a business banner / logo in a site credits section.

Hope this helps. I have a few Drupal tutorials and how-to's for absolute beginners here: http://www.digitalraindrop.com/Drupal and I'm working on a couple of similar Drupal help communities for community technologists, so there may be some useful information there.

Edit: You may also want to look into Elgg: http://elgg.org/

Dave.