Re: what to use for my web site

After reading all the responses so far I'd like to chime in.

If you are just creating a website and you don't need a custom application
then a CMS can be a great choice. I have worked with both Joomla and
Wordpress and I enjoy Wordpress much more. They have a new version...3.2
coming out very soon that has great speed and security improvements that
really are a great improvement... even though I consider Wordpress to be
best of breed already.

If you are going to develop a custom application then you have two
choices.... Framework, or scratch. Frameworks give you a boilerplate to
work from, DB connection classes, and commonly used widgets that will help
to speed up development time (once you get over the learning curve). There
are a few prominent PHP frameworks if you are interested... Zend, Smarty,
and Symfony. As far as PHP frameworks go, I don't use them because I'm
not using widgets. I use html/css/js for my front end stuff and just link
it to PHP code for server side data manipulation. No PHP code see's the
light of the web.

Currently I'm developing a web application using PHP, javascript, html,
css. I use the javascript framework jQuery. There is also another really
nice one called ExtJS. I prefer jQuery for its core but ExtJS has more
widgets ready out of the box. I could go on for hours about js
frameworks, advantages and disadvantages, etc. But for Javascript and
today's diversity of browsers you should almost certainly be using a JS
framework to help speed up development time because they handle the cross
browser stuff for you.

If you are going in the direction of a CMS then you will inevitably need
to use a theme. You can buy a theme, customize an existing free theme, or
build your own from scratch. Building from scratch is like learning a
framework. There is a nice GUI tool for building CMS themes called
Artisteer. Go to artisteer.com to check it out. Its a nice tool and
gives you a great place to start. You can really do some nice things with
it... and you can mod the themes later for more control.

Anyway... most of my customers use Wordpress and I work with a very good
designer for those themes. So if you would like to sub out the design
work I can help you with that. Contact me offlist if interested
brycekmartin at gmail dot com.

Website -> hand code or CMS
Custom App -> hand code or Language Frameworks


Thanks
Bryce Martin
Programmer/Analyst I
570-546-4777



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[WEB400] what to use for my web site






Hi everyone, I hope this question isn't stupid!

I'm not a web programmer (yet) but trying hard. I have a simple site
that I created with php4 and mysql. I rewrote it in php5, I rewrote it
again with mysql to xml then converted with xsl. I rewrote it again in
Java. All for the pleasure(!) of learning new stuff. I've dabbled with
Joomla! and quite a bit more with Drupal. I read that a large
percentage of sites were written with Wordpress so I looked briefly at
that.

I met someone who wants to pay me to do a website. It seems to me that
either I should use a content management system or use a php or java
solution, but using a framework. I don't yet have any experience of
frameworks. Now here's my question : having seen what one can do with
Drupal, what are the reasons for NOT using a CMS?

I would like to use Wordpress for the new site, simply for the reason
that it is far more widely used if the statistics are right.
Curiously, I have a filter on CMS on a site proposing contracts and
there are often requirements for Drupal developpers but I've yet to
see one for Joomla! or Wordpress. My own problem with learning to use
a CMS was that it was preventing me from learning PHP!

Any thoughts, advice would be great, thanks.