Yelp Clone on Rails

Rails
1

I am thinking about building a Yelp clone for a large city in a
developing country (my startup dream). Is there an existing Rails
sample
code base that I can use to start from, e.g., one where the standard
Yelp
features such as posting reviews, and searching for businesses based on
location have been implemented?

Because I have only coded for fun, my little coding experience has been
limited to a social networking Rails 3.0 project that I did a couple of
years ago. I love Rails and would like to continue to develop my Rails
skills.

I don’t want to start from scratch in this Yelp clone project.
However, Googling “Yelp clone” returns only PHP packages.
See yelp clone source code - Google Search . The most popular is a commercial WordPress
theme. See http://www.geotheme.com/ . All of its features look very
appealing. It looks like the fastest way to going live. But I have
never
done anything in PHP. Furthermore, I am skeptical of commercial
ready-made
solutions where I will probably not be able to customize its code to do
exactly what I want. See disadvantages of using commercial packages at
Use Drupal or Yelp clone script? | Drupal.org . For example, I want to have Yelp’s "
Redo
search when map moved " feature .

WordPress makes things look too easy. I guess making a good Yelp clone
cannot be that easy. Otherwise, someone else would have done it in that
city. Actually, the city already has a number of business review sites.
But they all suck. In a way, I am somewhat glad that it is not that
easy.
Otherwise, I would not have an opportunity to make a really outstanding
Yelp clone with Rails. But time is of the essence. Hopefully, I can go
live, and build up a good review database and name recognition before
Yelp
itself jumps into the city.

Do you think Rails would be a good fit for this project as opposed to
WordPress? Is there a free Rails sample project I should use as a
starting
point for this project to speed up development?

Thank you for your input.

2

Hi,

What you’re looking to build here is a fairly complicated web app with,
presumably, a lot of custom taxonomy (sorting things by area of
business,
neighbourhood, etc) - a large, document-driven app. This is definitely
something you’d be better off using a framework like Rails for, rather
than
Wordpress. (Approximately 99% of WP nightmares, in my experience, come
from
custom post types and the workarounds necessary to do things other than
your basic blogs; unless that theme does EXACTLY what you want, I would
predict a world of pain.)

That said, it sounds to me like a pretty big job, and I wouldn’t expect
to
be finished with it overnight, especially if it’s just you and your
computer on the job. There are undoubtedly loads of gems out there that
will speed things along, however - I will defer to the rest of this
group
for suggestions, as I am fairly new to Rails myself.

James

3

James,

I was looking to do something similar and I ran into this.

I am new to Ruby on rails too. Maybe we colloborate and learn to use
this
together.

4

James, Thank you very much for your response. Rails sounds like the
way
to go.

5

Hey I am building this opensourced project, it is not a Yelp clone in
fact
I just found out about Yelp,but it shares a lot of features now that I
look
at it. I have been working on it for 3 months now and it is my first
rails
project.

I would post my repo here but I dont want people to just clone it and
leave
me out of it. Just put too much work for it :stuck_out_tongue: , if you are interested
message me