Reddit Clone

I wrote a reddit-like social forum webapp in PHP. It uses the CodeIgniter MVC framework for clean separation of data, business logic, and presentation.

It diverges somewhat from typical reddit/digg functionality in some ways, (though these decisions are easy to change to suit tastes and preferences):

• Comment scoring shows positive and negative scores separately
• Topics are ranked (right now) by the scores of their comments, though this is easy to change.
• Blank URLs in a topic submit refers to the thread, like Reddit/YCNews.
• Supports the popular “nested comments” thread view.
• Supports lazy authentication. It uses a CAPTCHA to set a cookie on first post, user can choose a password later, making a very low barrier to entry.
• Twill test framework that posts random topics and comments from a Markov chain, given a set of username/passwords to log in as. Its hilarious!

What’s missing?

• RSS feeds
• Improved user profile pages
• Bookmarklets

The above will take about 4 weeks to get done. Features and price are negotiable.

Why I’m selling the site – I got the idea to make a just-for-fun Reddit-like site (plus a mischievous element), but as I got into the project, I realize I’m dreading the marketing aspects of the project, and might be willing to open-source or sell the code.

I coded this thing in about a month of my spare time. PHP isn’t my usual language choice, I’d normally prefer Django/Python for a web app, but after researching hosting providers, I decided PHP would be much cheaper to host.

If you’re a small startup with not much code, this project might give you a headstart. Let me know if you want a demo.

Cheers, Casey Marshall