I’m starting a website (more complicated than a blog) and would appreciate advice on which framework to use.
A person on my team uses wordpress and is enthusiastic about its possibilities, but a friend who works on rails is lobbying against it (“But it’s for blogs!”). Both can help me get started so I’ll probably chose either wordpress or rails because of that.
The question is : which?
What I want to do :
The site is centered around comparing and commenting constitution articles.
Users will browse articles by country and by topic, comment and vote on the articles, suggest topics for the articles (=tag them), post their suggestions of articles.
Users will create polls (like Facebook questions more or less) that other users can answer.
I’d also like a forum section where they can start discussions about a given article or a topic.
Users will also post links/documents relevant to an article or topic.
I want my users to be registered, give me certain info (gender, age, country…) and then get statistics about who voted/commented on what articles (It will be helpful for research).
WordPress looks cool because of how easy it looks to get something together and integrate plugins, even for a non-technical person, and there’s a huge number of plugins. But it’s designed for blogs so I’ll probably run into trouble and do dirty hacks because what I want to do is not a blog. Rails looks cool because it’s designed to do things like that so I can get precisely what I want, but there aren’t as many plugins, and it will require longer to code.
I’ll be spending the next two months on this, and when I leave the the person who has to take care of the site has little technical background (except wordpress), and I don’t want to have to do heavy maintenance after I leave.
I’m not scared of learning, but I do have limited time and I’m the only developer (though I might get help from volunteers.). I might not get all the functionality I want before I leave, but I do need to get something together.
What is your opinion here?
4 Answers
Your friend is a diva. WordPress started as a blog platform, but now it has grown beyond that and is encroaching on becoming a mid-tier content management system out of the box. If you like it and it is easy for you, use it. It seems to match up with what you are trying to do. Articles are essentially blog posts anyway.
You wouldn’t clean your dishes with an orbital buffer. Use what makes sense.
