[DaneAU]

Hello peoples

I am working on a new website for my own personal projects. I am planning on having a few aspects to the site, firstly a small site to resell some web-hosting for clients via word of mouth mainly. I will also be publishing articles, tutorials snippets on the site. I will also be managing some software i write and providing a method of downloading, discussing and reporting issues etc.. So the site has a few main roles. There is also some edu applications that i am writing using java and GWT that people will need access to. With permissions etc...

Looking and testing around i have really not found something that suits my needs. I have used Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress and a few others to trial this myself and have come to the realisation that i probablly am going to write this site from scratch. I thought about running a few different CMS's however this can really become taxing and annoying over time. About the only dropin tool i am considering is something lik Elgg so people can chatter and contribute. The site is semi business/personal.

I looked into some PHP frameworks, the main one i have zeroed in on is CodeIgnigter. It seems quite good however i am no expert yet in PHP and wouldn't mind sinking some teeth into. I figured using this project as a learning curve might not be such a bad idea. As you probably have gathered i am not well versed in frameworks for PHP. I am also not exactly certain PHP is the only tool i should be looking at. I was considering writing the entire site using GWT, i then thought about setting up a tomcat server and going down that path. I think i need to further investigate my options and that is why i have posted this. What are some of the options these days. I would prefer to steer away from a CMS as they just don't give me that flexiblity i am looking for. Plus i don't mind spending the next few months developing the site.

Cheers

[Lemur]

I would heavily consider looking into Git if you haven't already. It's a near universal version control system, and employers love to see some of your work. It's an overall win.

As far as frameworks, don't reinvent the wheel unless you have a substantially good reason to. If another framework already does what you need, or lacks a few features that can easily be plugged in, use that instead. Nothing against a custom CMS, but it has to have good reason to warrant its creation

[DaneAU]

Yea well the idea is to limit the number of drop in CMS's. I figure what i really want to do with the site is quite simple. Publish some articles, allow people to also publish should they so choose. Secondly i believe that these aspects can be modularised considering i am planning to make use of subdomains and employ the use of my SSL certificates on more critical aspects of the site. I of course need to interface with the PayPal API and or other methods. I have a whiteboard so i might try an etch up what it is exactly i am doing. Use cases and some structure in visual form often clarifies any issues and identifies major design issues.

I am an avid user of GIT Source Code Management, i also find Mercurial does all that i need. I have a development server setup within my network that i can utilise fully to explore all options. I plan on perhaps running some aspects of the site on this home server depending on the scale and load required. Dedicated servers are quite expensive down here.

[Lemur]

Wordpress + basic plugins will go all of that.

[DaneAU]

Yep i actually may give that a whirl, cheers Lemur