Matchmaking CMS-type software?

May 22, 2007 12:17 PM

Does a dating or matchmaking script exist that I can repurpose to allow professional schools to maintain profiles of their programs, and allow potential students to browse those profiles to find matches?

There's a little more to it. I'm helping someone setup a service so that art schools nationwide can maintain several profile pages as they like (sort of like editing myspace pages) and potential students, after they've registered, can browse/search those pages to find schools matching their criteria/interests.

We don't want to build something from scratch, but this seems like more than a vanilla CMS. It has elements of a dating service.

Are there scripts that come close to facilitating these sorts of things out of the box with minimal or no customization required?

We've looked at some of the heavily promoted dating scripts and they generally look very messy.

Any suggestions are *greatly* appreciated!

posted by pallen123 to Technology (2 answers total)

I've been working with a client who intends to launch a dating site. We reviewed about of dozen of these scripts, and yes, they are messy. Although it was not his choice when he finally made his decision on what software to purchase, I was impressed with phpFox as much for the installed user-based and discussion forums as for the features and code. It helps a lot when you're customizing this sort of script to be able to benefit from other peoples' support issues and customization questions.

PHPFox does give the user some built-in help with CSS styling and customization for their profiles, if you want to allow them to jazz things up. Here's hoping art students will make nicer looking pages than MySpace users.

The one thing you probably really must look for is a package that already supports customizable profile fields that you can define in an "Administrator" interface. I.E., you would delete the romantic/sexual profile fields and create new fields appropriate to your users... The whole project would be even messier if you had to write this part of programming code yourself!
posted by Robert Angelo at 2:17 PM on May 22, 2007

OT: I would totally make use of something like this in my desired field of study. I'm surprised it doesn't exist already for all grad schools (search by research area etc.).
posted by Octaviuz at 5:34 PM on May 22, 2007