tcornell05 Posted January 18, 2012 Share Posted January 18, 2012 I'm fairly new to php. I have been going to school for 2 years for "web development." I do enjoy working with php and learning new things with it, my question is for people who have been around it along time, professionally and can give me their honest answer. I have confusion whether to make websites from scratch, or whether to just use some CMS like drupal or wordpress.. Do you professionals typically use CMS's or just make your own with php and work from there? Say I'm making a website for a friend where he can upload pictures of his photography and artwork, only he will be frequently logging on to upload pictures to the "gallery" or to edit his "about me." Would something of even that simplicity typically be used with a CMS or from scratch? Just confusion on what is the best approach. Thanks for your help! Tyler Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/255317-new-member-here-i-have-a-question/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
scootstah Posted January 18, 2012 Share Posted January 18, 2012 Most developers tend to go the "rapid development" route. This means either using frameworks or an existing CMS to cut the workload down. The popular CMS's have a huge amount of plugins which means they can do pretty much everything with little effort. The popular frameworks also have a lot of libraries so they too have a lot of existing functionality. Many freelancers have come up with their own home-brew systems that are more targeted for their niche and clientele. For the example you provided, (and as much as I hate it) WordPress sounds like a good fit. WordPress has a very friendly user interface which means simple little sites like that are quick and easy. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel unless you want to know how the wheel works. Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/255317-new-member-here-i-have-a-question/#findComment-1309044 Share on other sites More sharing options...
ManiacDan Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Managers have to pick two of these three options: Fast, cheap, good. (It's called the Project Triangle) If they choose fast and cheap, I give them joomla. If they choose fast and good, I'll hire more people and utilize an existing framework and re-use old application code as much as possible. If they choose cheap and good, it will take a while because I'll write the whole thing myself and take my time. I am currently maintaining three entire websites for my company, and they actually fall into the three categories: 1) The main web application: Fast and good. We need this done yesterday, but it has to be perfect. The whole existing team plus a team of contractors are writing the whole thing from scratch built on symfony 2 (a rapid development framework) and propel (a database ORM solution) 2) A documentation website: Fast and cheap. We had to kick something out the door for competitive reasons, but it didn't have to be good. It just had to exist. I slapped together a quick symfony module to handle some of the hairier bits and a junior dev stood up a joomla instance and styled it in a week. 3) A one-off solution for a customer: Cheap and good. We need to fully satisfy the customer but we don't want to spend too much money on it, so we're getting their requirements banged out whenever we have a spare hour, using whichever developer is free. Using the tool that's appropriate for the job is the majority of decision making in programming. Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/255317-new-member-here-i-have-a-question/#findComment-1309244 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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