What's the best way to build this website for little to no money and with limited programing skills?

Maybe a Ning network?

I’ve just set up a sample one on Ning, it’s not bad but I don’t like the fact that they run ads on there. I’d prefer something that i can set up on my server. If it is easy enough to manage.

But I’m going to keep playing with this one for a little while. The user interface is great! Thanks

@dverhey Thats a good site.

Bravenet.com has always offered many great services. I strongly suggest trying them out. They free services have ads, for little money, there are no ads, though you must host on their server.

Also try a CMS. There are a few that you can download and manage on your own server like http://www.joomla.org/ or http://www.vignette.com/ or http://bricolage.cc/ or http://www.crownpeak.com/ or http://www.adobe.com/products/contribute/

@bluedoggiant – thanks for the list. I actually have joomla and drupal on the server now and am trying to figure out the right modules and configurations to get what i want. I’ll have to check out your other options and see how those look.

@fireside

Rightyo tell me what you come up with. I am currently setting up wordpress.org on my server…urgg

ExpressionEngine could be modified to do almost all of that. It’s a commercial product but has a free version. You could either do it with an open blog system where everyone is a blog author, or buy the forum module for like $50 and install that. You could then modify the member pages to allow people to contact each other, etc. It’s a very powerful script and very easy to modify input fields and stuff to do what you need to do.

You might be able to do this with elgg. www.elgg.org

wordpress should be dead simple to setup, and with the right plugins it should do everything you’re looking for.