I have been working with DNN, on and off, for the last year. I have learned a lot, thanks to you kind people. My Goal is to make a solid, dependable online community/Agency using DNN. The only problem is that I was hoping someone would have come out with a comprehensive social networking module that had all the features and work flow of many php base "dating and social networking" applications( boonex dolphin, VLD dating, phpfox, etc).

I guess I could make live simple and simply use an "all in one" php solution. But, When I made the trainsition, what I did notice the most is how solid DNN runs in comparison to the php solutions.

My ultimate goal is to have a website that allows users to find each other, just like they do on a dating website or on myspace. The community modules I have purchased and used do not seem to have the advanced search features like many dating scripts/applications do. Unfortunately, this is what I need.

My Question would be. What would be the best way to attain this feature? I need an module that can run a search query, display results, just like a dating site and then allow users to select a thumb/photo or link of that user they are interested in so that they can have their portfolio(profile) displayed.

I am not sure if I should use this search module in conjunction with my existing profile modules or completely build the whole community off of this module. It obviously needs to access the DNN core so that other modules such as my video module and forums can communicate as well.

Please let me know your thoughts ?

Thanks

I think we are all waiting on the new Active Profiles (formally My Profile) to be release ;)

I would recommend that you store all the user profile data in the DNN profile fields so that other modules can interact with the data aswell.

If you want to make an advanced user search then I would recommend that you use listX. This is a great devolper tool that will allow you to build great search  pages.

Here is a demo of a search page that is linked to the DNN profiles:

http://www.myerotichobby.com/Providers/ProvidersSearchBasic/tabid/64/Default.aspx

Just let me know if you need any more info or how to get started :)

Take a look, too, at the modules offered by Smart-Thinker.com.  They've made some great strides with recent updates of their modules.

A combination of Smart-Thinker, ActiveForums, and Ventrian's modules can get you quite far down the road.  And, the really good news is that these three companies are aware of one another, and there are some ways to integrate these modules.  Oh, and Engage's Publish module has some nice hooks that link comments to ActiveForums forums.