I am looking to start my own social networking site, but I wanted to build the application completely from scratch. I've done some intermediate PHP programming before but I will mostly be creating the site off of tutorials online and what I can gather from e-books and such. Does anybody have a timeframe of how long they think it would take? I am shooting to complete it within a month or two but I don't know if that's too much to expect of myself to learn PHP that quickly.
I build a basic one in a bit under 300 hours, so you should be able to do it in 2-4 months depending on how fast you can code and how much time you can spend / month. I can add that i made serveral rewrites on some modules when i made mine.. Im a speed wh**e, if it´s not fast enough then i rewrite it until it is.
It really depends on the complexity of what you're doing. Something like facebook would take years, a basic twitter style program (without SMS, and the huge mass of users) could take a week or month.