Building pic-rating site with PHP framework?

[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

 

 

[alexweber15]

I'm all for building it yourself!

I've been in a similar situation in the past, where using a CMS seemed like overkill.

 

That said, depending on your experience, some frameworks might be a bit intimidating at first (took me a while to get used to Zend Framework for example).  Cake looks nice and I've been wanting to try it, I say go ahead and try some of the available tutorials to see if you feel comfortable with it.

 

One thing you want to keep in mind when building it yourself is planning... try to figure out exactly what you need and how it will come together before diving in so you don't end up having to redo something or even worse create kludges that will bite you in the ass down the road!

 

On the other hand, with a CMS you can be really experimental and reorganize things a lot along the way.