Time

[traineeirishprogrammer]

I am wondering in general (of you who are experts and involved in large projects)
how long would it take to develop a large server scripted (say php) website which attracts 10's of thousands of people each day. lets say a medium social networking site with simple functions.

With lets say 5 people working on it.

If you got a plan what processes would you do on it before you write any code.

i.e develop architecture etc.

Finally when you are developing classes for your systems how would you think it out in terms of functionality and declaring properties

[helimeef]

I am wondering in general (of you who are experts and involved in large projects)
how long would it take to develop a large server scripted (say php) website which attracts 10's of thousands of people each day. lets say a medium social networking site with simple functions.

With lets say 5 people working on it.

If you got a plan what processes would you do on it before you write any code.

i.e develop architecture etc.

Finally when you are developing classes for your systems how would you think it out in terms of functionality and declaring properties

Well, considering the fact that I've made a forum before (hasn't been released though), what I learned is to plan everything before you start coding. Work on features individually. Make sure to have like a library of functions for the website for functions that are commonly used (for example in the forum I have threads::getAll () to return threads as arrays).
I made the forum by myself, it has very few features, but it took about 3 weeks. Now I'm on the 3rd build of it, vers. 2.2b, which i've been working on for about 2 months, and constantly adding new features.
Good luck, I wish I had 5 people to help me :)