Hi, I’ve got an idea for a new site. It will be a site comprising of pages of recipes, forums to discuss, blogs for individuals to track their projects etc.

I’m wondering what kind of web technologies I should start out with. I have experience with Perl and Java and SQL but I’m willing to learn PHP or Ruby or whatever if those are better options.

Any opinions?

Drupal.org

It can handle everything you want to accomplish, it’s built in php but you can get almost anything built without actually knowing any php

Yeah, doing it custom would be a huge job. If you had a group of people to help you, and were planning on turning this into a major business and monetising it properly, doing it custom can help with growth, speed, etc.. but at the same time, it’s a HUGE investment of time to make it all from scratch.

I’d recommend using Drupal too these days.. it’s proven it can handle high-traffic sites (whitehouse.gov etc).. and it lets you concentrate on marketing the site, rather than bug fixing and shit like that.

Another vote for drupal, even if it does drive me crazy at times.

Drupal and learn PHP youll be able to do all that.

And you don’t have to learn PHP first, the more you work with Drupal, the more you’ll end up understanding PHP as time goes by

PHP and MySQL is pretty much everywhere in popular open source apps. vBulletin, Drupal, WordPress. It’s very easy to pick up PHP after knowing Perl.

I was very frustrated by Drupal, but it has so many devotees that it’s probably very rewarding to stick with it. I just didn’t have the patience to figure out why very popular add-ons completely broke the stock system, why full administrators didn’t automatically have access to everything, or why developing templates is so difficult.

Joomla is another option for a CMS. Very popular, has lots of add-ons and attractive templates. There are some licensing issues with the add-ons, however; something about the GPL… I dunno, my eyes glazed over when I was reading about it.

WordPress is the lowest common denominator if Joomla is still too complex. You’ll have to add all the extra functionality not present in the blogging engine through plugins and custom code, and it’s not going to be the most robust engine for traffic.

And then there’s always custom development from scratch.

I guess it really depends on if it’s going to take longer to integrate or develop the extra features and customs you want into an existing package, and we can only talk generalities unless you want to bust out a complete design document — which you probably don’t want to do without an NDA if you have a great idea.

When was the last time you tried Drupal, a year ago there were tons of great modules but all of them were semi incomplete for Drupal 6, that’s no longer the case, there are official releases of most everything and they actually work.

For me, I learn best by video representation, (e.g. screencasts).. these two sites REALLY got the ball rolling for me..

Thanks for all your help! I’ll look into these.

I didn’t mean that I would necessarily want to create all the code from scratch myself, but use frameworks and libraries. I just don’t expect to use some kind of commercial prepackaged thing, I have worked in web development for Fortune 500 companies before.

If you want RAD, look into CodeIgniter (PHP framework) or Ruby on Rails (Ruby framework). Personally, I think Rails is somewhat of a fad, but not all fads are useless I guess. Look at some tutorials and see if that’s something you can get into. They both use MVC.

There are lots of other PHP frameworks, but I think CodeIgniter is the one I hear about the most.

Otherwise, if you’re looking to create stuff from scratch without a framework there are lots of PEAR libraries for PHP. That and MySQL will let you do anything you want.

Are there many advantages of Drupal 6 over 5?

Drupal 6 has more features, and most contributed modules only appear to be improving the Drupal 6 versions and merely fixing bugs in the Drupal 5 versions. Drupal 6 is easier to develop modules for, and themes. Also Drupal 7 will be out soon enough, dont’ want to get to far behind.

The better question is whether Drupal 5 holds any advantages of Drupal 6, and that purely depends on your needs, if you have a module that is imperative to your website, and only exists in Drupal 5, that may be your reason to stick with 5..

The reason I ask is that I’ve never really used Drupal 6, and our boss insists on us sticking with 5, but I’m not sure why.

sounds like something vbulletin would work perfect for.

sounds like i need to start learning up on drupal though. I cheese out and use wordpress for everything since it’s so easy to get a site up in minutes. Anyone have any must-know durpal sites suggestions?