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I want to create a Groupon.com clone. Do you think WordPress is the right system? If not, do you have any other recommendations? Any tips/tricks you have?

What are the recommended plug-ins?

If anyone has any better CMS option, I'd love a recommendation...

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WordPress is the perfect tool for this. In full disclosure, we've actually built this very thing at groupdealsplugin.com. Let me know if you'd like a demo! – user5368 May 14 '11 at 15:46

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You can build a clone of just about any website using WordPress. The question, though, is how much work are you willing to put into it? Since you're already asking for tips/tricks and plug-ins, I'm guessing you want to make a quick clone that requires little to no additional development time.

That said, here are the basic features of Groupon that you'll need to reproduce:

Different listings for different regions/cities

You can do this several different ways, but the easiest would be with a custom taxonomy for your site. Each city or region would be a taxonomy term, which you can use to separate and categorize the posted deals.

Displaying deals for different regions would require you only to add a region-specific filter to your query.

Coupon Purchase

The core of Groupon is the ability to actually purchase the posted coupons. You could set this up with just about any of the e-commerce or shopping cart plug-ins available in the repository.

Deal Timeout

Every Groupon deal expires after a certain period of time. You can achieve the same kind of functionality with the Post Expirator plug-in.

Social Networking

There's no real value in Groupon if people can't share it with others. I'd recommend a Facebook Like button or a Tweet This widget somewhere so people can broadcast deals as they're found.

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I'd look into Pods CMS and Pods UI to create real database tables that represent your data. With custom post types and a lot of plugins the site won't scale very well. Although, if it's just a quick project that might be the way to go just to move forward and get something going.

Pods CMS is the greatest thing since sliced bread, or dare I say... fire.

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There are few gropun clone scripts out there, some even come as WordPress theme and some are just dedicated scripts

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