With so many tools and technologies lying around, I am looking for suggestions around the best ones (UI/server-side frameworks/database/CMS) to use for building a web(site/app) similar to Facebook itself.
Details of the website cannot be revealed due to privacy concerns. But largely, the experience and interactions would be similar to what Facebook has (such as continuous feeds, groups, upload data/files, comments, etc.), just that it would be in a different domain.
Information (or links) on what technologies/frameworks are such sites/portals using will also be of great help!
The simple answer is PHP. But people likely imagine a LAMP stack.
Facebook has reengineered the front side and back side of PHP, as I understand it. They use the HipHop compiler to cut the cost of execution of PHP. And I don’t know the details, but they have some kind of backside distributed database they use instead of PHP/LAMP traditional use of MySQL.
(See http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=24413138919 for a description of one of the mechanisms they use, Cassandra).
If you don’t care about scale, you can skip these two steps and save a lot of engineering.