Best way to build picture-rating site?

[TripRev]

Hi all, thanks in advance for any advice anyone can give.

 

I'm going to build a picture-rating site which will allow users to join, submit their own pictures and rate other people's pics. All submitted pics will be tagged, categorised and there will also be RSS feeds for newly submitted, top rated etc.

 

So I need to start with a CMS like Drupal or Joomla with Gallery plugin, right? Well, I've looked at some CMS' and they all seem to:

 

A) Look terrible/cluttered, and

 

B) are far too complex for what I want the site to do.

 

As I'm primarily a front-end developer, something about customised CMS' designs always just makes me cringe - they all seem to look the same and I will want to have pernickety control over all the small interface details. Also the site doesn't need a lot of the functionality that large CMS' offer. Users just need to be able to browse, join, submit pics and rate pics.

 

So, I was thinking about using a PHP framework (CakePHP has cought my eye) and building it from scratch. Can anyone confirm that this is a viable option rather than use a CMS or am I insane? I've done a few basic PHP/MySQL sites before and have been looking for an excuse to learn about a PHP framework. This is a personal project (not for a client) so would be a good opportunity to take the time to learn a framework.

 

Or maybe the more experienced developers among you can tell from the way I'm writing that I should stick to using a CMS?

 

Cheers

T

 

 

[JonnoTheDev]

Stay away from off the shelf CMS systems!

Using a framework will mean that you wont have to build many of the lower level modules yourself such as database abstraction, file uploading, image manipulaion, user authentication, etc as they should be available to you. However you will need to study the framework documentation.