Friendship system and mutual like/match equals chat Laravel 5.4

"Vlindrtuin" or memberarea

Hello everyone,

I am building a free social network for people who live with disabilities,

this is because of my dayjob, there we feel that the people we work with fall short in a lot of social area's,

like making friends and dating,

to help them out we had the idea for this "local network" where they can talk to each other on their own terms, and find friends, and make it more easy for them to let someone else know they are romantically interested, since I had some experience with programming I thought I would give it a shot,

came to find out I love it so much that I am considering joining a programming bootcamp later this year.

I am building it with Laravel(5.4). This has been a learning curve for sure (and still is). Now I was wondering if someone has any tips or suggestions on how I would go about this

I got the users to be displayed in a memberarea("Vlindrtuin") and I want them to be able to add each other as friends. When they become mutual friends they appear in the friends-section and a chat function should "open up".

They should also be able, to let each other know they are "romantically" interested by sending a butterfly, this notifies user X that user Y is interested.

When they click the "heart" and both parties have clicked the "heart" the "match" should appear in the matches-section and again, a chat function should appear

I am new to this kind of to programming and have tried http://ift.tt/27SWHNX but I am an absolute beginner and don't really understand how i would put that package into practice (notifying a user someone added them and such)

I hope this is a clear-cut question and can use all the help I can get.

(I am considering putting the whole thing on Github and make it so that the whole programming world can help out, this large group of people, to make them feel safe in being social, finding people with mutual interests and maybe even the love of their lives, but again I am open to any other suggestions)

If something is not clear, please do ask, I am eagerly learning everything I can get my head around that involves programming.

Yours truly,

via Chebli Mohamed