Gadgetopia

How I Built a Web 2.0 Dating Site in 66.5 Hours: Someone built this site in 66.5 hours using CakePHP, about which I hear a lot of buzz these days.

Let this be a testament to Web 2.0 and the effectiveness of rapid development frameworks: I built a full-featured dating website (http://mingle2.com), from concept to launch, in 66.5 hours. In a typical 9-5 job this would amount to about a week and a half. Deliverables included:

The Idea - Cooking up a brand with a name, identity, and purpose; Planning - Creating functional specifications, visual wireframes, and information architecture; Design - Creating mock-ups and defining aesthetics, typography, positioning, and color; Development - Writing the actual code; Testing - Ironing out the kinks; Launch - Going live

I’ve always been interested in doing a “site raising” for charities where we conceive, design, and build a site in a Saturday.