which is best framework or technolgy for a community site development?

Question

which is the best framework to develop a community web site. For the MVC architecture, is there any disadvantage while using frameworks.

or is it better to develop that in a pure php with OOPs concept?

thanks in advance!!

Answer 1

Drupal is a very easy to use and extendable framework for building communities and MVC apps in PHP.

Answer 2

Do you want an MVC framework or a CMS?

For MVC frameworks, there isn't simply the best. It's always about what you need, but here is a short overview of the most common frameworks.

If you're looking for a CMS I'd suggest Drupal for community like functionality.

or is it better to develop that in a pure php with OOPs concept?

If you really need that last little bit of speed, do it in pure php... I'd suggest, use a good stable Framework like CakePHP, symfony or CodeIgniter. It'll help you avoid a lot of mistakes you'd make if you do it all by yourself and it makes development (not the page) a lot faster.

Answer 3

I switched from pure PHP to Django (python) and I cannot tell you enough good stuff about it. Using an ORM and automatic admin system was key for me and have saved me tons and tons of tedious work.

If you don't want to learn a new language there're probably some very nice frameworks for PHP as well.

Answer 4

For simple sites you can try CMS, such as Joomla or Drupal or even others, wich will let you concentrate more on content than on programming/modeling.

As for MVC, frameworks definitely help, you do not need reinvent the wheel. Escaping strings, session handling, db access, views templating, web forms and other important stuff is done in formalized, dev community proven/tested ways. More to say, frameworks leave you with the freedom option to enhance functionality (e.g. inheriting/overriding/adding classes). So try download some of them, try a simple app, take a look at the docs, and decide if it suits your needs.

Personally, I have a good opinion of Kohana framework.

Answer 5

take a look on elgg , this is new and has lot's of inbuilt things, and easly extensible.

Answer 6

I think for a community-site the idea/concept of the site is much more important than the technology.

Many technologies are mature for web-development. I would pick the one, you most comfortable with. From the features they aren't very different and if the technology is actively developed, you can be sure, that it will adapt future ideas.

Answer 7

I suggest you use some MVC framework. CMS systems are nice, but a time will come when you'll want to do something outside of the box and you will have to create plugins. Now, all this is nice until you have to upgrade. And you do have to upgrade because security issues arise all the time.

Anyway, here are some frameworks that are IMHO worth considering. It's important to use one which is known and popular because:

• more users will be able to answer your begginer questions
• more users mean bugs are found and fixed faster
• there is also more user-generated content, examples and documentation

CodeIgniter and its fork Kohana

CI has excellent documentation, a few very good tutorial videos and it's easy to be up and running in a very short time.

Yii framework

Has excellent documentation, and is very powerful. Also, it is very fast, and beats most other frameworks on speed tests by a large margin. It takes time to learn to use it well, mostly because there aren't enough examples, and you don't have such great video tutorials like CodeIgniter does.

CakePHP

I find it a little bit too restrictive (file naming, placing, etc.) but this could be good for a complete newbie, or a team (less chance for maverick developers to mess things up).