[blueeyebrit]

Hi all, this is actually a reintroduction as I've been on a bit of a hiatus from the site recently.

I'm Daniel and I co-own and run Rogue Connect, an exclusive social networking site that is aimed at 16-25 year olds interested in socialising and fashion.

Rogue Connect was relaunched in December last year after about 6 months of nothing being changed on the site. We left if that long as the redevelopment was so major, we simply couldn't implement any new features. Since then we've had a fair bit of success.

Without any traditional advertising (in fact, without any) our sign ups have basically doubled. In fact, in the past three weeks we've had around 200 people sign up, and we have in excess of 100 hoping for membership (being an exclusive club not everyone is given it).

That's me and Rogue Connect by way of a brief introduction

[nado]

nice, it looks like you made parts (or maybe all) of the site in Joomla/Mambo.

How'd you get the tag feature running?

Did you hire a programmer to create the site?

Are you planning on making money off the site through advertising?

... not planning on copying the site lol, just interested.

Welcome again to the forums!

[blueeyebrit]

Hi Nado

Originally Posted by nado

nice, it looks like you made parts (or maybe all) of the site in Joomla/Mambo.

The Connections (soon to be majorly reworked) is an implementation of Mambo. I'm tempted to upgrade to Joomla as it comes across as a little bit more active these days.

How'd you get the tag feature running?

With lots of man hours It's a PHP/MySQL implementation of folksonomy but with categorisation (which I haven't seen any sites offer to date).

Did you hire a programmer to create the site?

Nope, 99% was self coded. I had to teach myself PHP to do it and do a heck of a lot of research into security issues and so on.

Are you planning on making money off the site through advertising?

The advertising model is being considered. It's not our only one, but we certainly know we won't be charging for accounts!

[nado]

Yeah Joomla is definately taking over from Mambo these days.

I'm actually trying to create a site in it, although still pretty difficult not knowing any programming such as PHP.

Where'd you start with learning PHP etc?

[blueeyebrit]

Originally Posted by nado

Where'd you start with learning PHP etc?

I'm terrible at learning things like it in any form of an 'educational context', so I'd find something I wanted to do and looked up tutorials on how to do just that. There's so much on PHP on the web you're bound to find a tutorial. So if I wanted to create an array delete function, I just looked that up.

After a while it all just starts to click, and the more tutorials you end up reading the more advanced you become because you start to learn all the different ways to do particular things.

[nado]

cool thanks... all I have to do is force myself to learn it