Hi, I want to develop a question answer site like this one, for students to ask schools and career planning related questions. I was planning to use Joomla as CMS but am not sure whether such site could work fine wih a CMS. I have little experience in website development and it will be a learning experience for me.Can such a site work fine by using a CMS or i have to make it in pure PHP programming.(in that case how would i go about developing administrative tools ) Please guide me in planning the development.thanx
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A:
Well i dont really think a CMS is the right choice here. Except for maybe a few static apges like FAQ's, TOS, stuff like that the site is going to be pure data interaction and stats. You could do it ina CMS but i think it would be more of a headache than its worth. Instead i would recommend using a RAD oriented development framework like Cake or Symfony. Unless you have specific needs you can get most of the admin done with the generated admin iterfaces. You might also be able to use much of the generated CRUD for the user areas, but not doubt some customization if not something completely different will be needed here.
If youre not stuck on php Ruby on Rails (ruby) and Django (python) suport much of the same feature set on their respective languages.
That said all these are going to have a high learning curve if you dont come from some kind of programming background (maybe even if you do)... Then again so is a CMS and at least the frameworks ive mentioned are going to automate a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
prodigitalson
2010-01-29 19:28:04
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A:
One easy, while costly, option would be to license the software behind Stackoverflow.
ArrayShift seems to be a free and open-source clone of the this platform, built on top of Drupal:
A question/answer site built to emulate the core functionality of the StackOverflow.com site and the StackExchange platform. Originally built as a fantasy site for Lullabot's Do It With Drupal conference in December 2009, the installation profile is capable of bootstrapping and configuring the initial site.
It currently implements a reasonable subset of the site's functionality, but is incomplete and far from bug-free. It has rough edges that need to be smoothed out and functionality that needs to be finished in other contrib modules before this package could be considered a full feature-clone of Stack Overflow, or before it could be considered ready-for-use by site builders who do not already know Drupal well. A TODO.txt will be coming shortly.
Jørn Schou-Rode
2010-01-29 19:28:57
It's probably safe to assume that's not really the learning experience he's looking for.
Andy E
2010-01-29 19:31:03
Oooh... i didnt know about that. Thats pretty cool. However, i think he wants to learn how to implement this, not nessecarily just install and configure something. I could be wrong though.
prodigitalson
2010-01-29 19:31:53
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A:
With Joomla, it would have to be a custom component that handles the questions/answers, custom user scripts that handle reputation, moderation, etc (if you want that kind of thing).
I think the only big benefits Joomla will provide are templating, registration, localisation and database management, most of the other stuff you will have to do yourself anyway.
Andy E
2010-01-29 19:31:41