Simple Framework or CMS for a trading platform?

Question

I have a relatively simple site on my hands, and have for nearly a year, but I can't seem to find a platform to build it on that doesn't fight back at the way I want to do things. Here are the key features:

• Customizable profiles. Profile tags.
• Two primary content types: Haves & Wants
• Both content types searchable/taggable and expire with a "Taken" symbol if user chooses.
• Private messaging.
• Daily cron attempts to find matches of Haves and Wants with similar tags and uses email alerts.

I think I can understand the logic of building this in Rails... but I'm too much of a noob to execute it. Is there a easier framework or cms out there that can produce something like this?

Additional information: We currently are using a modified version of the Classipress template for wordpress. It got us a little ways through development... but we can't seem to convince wordpress to post more than one type of content or tags. http://mybarterhub.com/

Answer 1

I wouldn't attempt something like this on Wordpress (not what it was designed for), but any of the frameworks you mention are more than capable. Have you looked at Drupal? I think it hits a sweet spot of allowing you to do a lot without actually programming, but also allowing programmers to customize it heavily through modules. It has a lot of the community and taxonomy features you need -- either built in or available through common modules.

Answer 2

If you're unable to get too deep into a framework like CakePHP, I would say Drupal is your best bet. Drupal is pretty non-coder friendly, but if you're going to make it work for projects that are more complex than out-of-the-box type situations, there's a slight learning curve.

There's at least one module that lets you use a custom Content Type for the user profile, which should allow you to tag profiles (the profile content type nodes) using the taxonomy module. Users in Drupal aren't nodes, so I'm guessing that's why tagging them wasn't working for you.

As for searches, all content should be indexed and searchable in Drupal as long as it's set up to do so. I'm not sure what modules are available for specifically searching by Taxonomy term, but, if you're using a tag system and you want to present haves/wants by tag, that's easy enough to set up with the wonderful Views module. A while ago I think I set up views that mirrored the taxonomy vocab/term structure and just redirected to the view using a Taxonomy Redirect module when someone clicked on a tag.

I think that if you can't make it work in Drupal for some reason (or you really don't like Drupal), you'd have to get into CakePHP or one of the other frameworks out there, but Drupal is definitely able to accomplish what you're aiming to do, probably without any custom PHP coding involved if you got all the right modules together.