Software for quickest establishment of an online presence

Question

So, every so often you get sites like http://www.twitmaps.com - sites created quickly and pushed online for a random purpose.

Often either you have plenty of spare time, or you just don't have the opportunity to get your own ideas online. For example in this one, the snow images are very vague and could do with more accuracy.

What tools / languages do people use to make a site as quickly and efficiently as possible? Not one with a shop or anything like that - just 1-5 simple php pages, some API linkins to other sites, and a mysql backend. Wordpress is great for blogs, but what about general purpose websites?

I've written sites in ASP, php and am happy playing around with databases and the like - I just want a way to quickly shove something online :)

Answer 1

You will find frameworks like drupal and Joomla of great service for this.

Answer 2

http://cakephp.org/

Best web framework I have ever used

Answer 3

You have a few choices.

1. Established blog/CMS software like Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal. You can do almost everything with plugins.

2. If you need something more flexible use one of frameworks like ROR, Django, CodeIgniter, Zend etc

3. Use code generator tool like PHPRunner.

Really depends on what you familiar with.

Answer 4

CakePHP is good for a PHP-based framework. Since you have PHP experience, this is probably a good place to start. It's designed for rapid website development using a database for storing information.

If you're willing to experiment with new things, give Ruby on Rails a go. CakePHP was initially modelled after Rails, and it's even easier to use when creating simple websites.

For smaller sites that don't really require a database, I would wholeheartedly recommend Sinatra. It is Ruby-based, just like Rails. With Passenger (also known as mod_rails), deploying Rails or Sinatra websites become as easy as uploading files with FTP.

Answer 5

Since you are asking for the quickest way, I'll have to say absolutely, definitely Wordpress or Dokuwiki. They both come with a very quick installer. Wordpress is richer in Plugins, has more good looking templates and requires even less time to get familiar with than Dokuwiki. Dokuwiki doesn't need a database, Wordpress does.

Whenever I need to set up something really quick, without touching a line of code, I go for one of these.