productivity superstar frameworks/tools for side gigs

Question

Hi all,

If you were going to start building web sites as a consulting business on the side -- keeping your day job -- and you also had a toddler and a wife, what frameworks/tools would you pick to save you typing?

Any language.

I'm looking for a productivity superstar stack that won't tie my hands too much when I have to update the site 6 months later, or "evolve" the data model once in production.

It needs to allow me to say "yes" to the client: community features, CMS, security, moderation, AJAX, ...

Thanks! JB

Answer 1

My answers are going to revolve around the .NET stack.

1. Use Master pages and CSS templates. This makes it so much easier to pop in a new look and feel for your customer.

2. For sure I'd include the Dynamic Data framework in the .NET world.

3. Hosting might become an issue for your customer. Questions around managing email addresses, procedures on how to quickly update the website to include the new contact phone number (different for each customer, I'd assume) Consider getting a reseller account on your favorite webhost, and dole out webhosting accounts as appropriate. There are lots of issues around this point. It may turn out to be a nice source of recurring revenue.

Build yourself a few patterns including a database wrapper which would handle all your data calls (i.e. a dll which wraps all your data calls, sets up your ADO.NET objects, runs your sproc calls, and picks up the connstring from app.config or something similar.)

This goes a long way to maintainability as well.

Answer 2

Take a look at Microsoft's Sharepoint server if you'd like a pre-made framework with many options for plugging in your own code. Sharepoint is kind of a world unto itself but it is a very powerful environment.

Update: I'm surprised to have been voted down on this one. Keep in mind that the questioner specifically requested frameworks that included a CMS. Sharepoint meets this criteria - unlike straight .NET or other web development frameworks.

If you are going to vote the entry down, I think you owe it to the person who asked the question to explain why you don't think he should not even explore it as an option. You could be right - collective wisdom is what voting on SO is all about. But without an explanation, we don't know why you think you are right.

Answer 3

I would suggest Django. Super simple to get something up and running really quick. You are using Python which has a large library to go with it. For me Ruby on Rails would be a close second.

Answer 4

I'd probably look at DotNetNuke. Its easy to set up (a lot of hosts will do it for you) and easy to use and put together a custom site that business's will be able to maintain in the future.

Its fairly easy to create custom modules that are specific to a business and hundreds of modules for sale (or free) that can be integrated into DNN for special uses.

Answer 5

I would recomend going with anything MVC in a language you can undertand! Theres a couple of CMS's in python, php and ruby using that design and well... that allows you to be ready for combat for Ajax and expanding anything very fast.

Answer 6

This is definitely not a question that can be answered.

I prefer asp.net webforms because I think it allows for extremely rapid web app development, but I am sure you will receive recommendations for:

asp.net mvc Ruby on Rails PHP and some framework Python and some framework such as Django

I believe PHP has the most pre-built apps that you can use, though asp.net also has the things you are looking for.

All of these platforms and frameworks can do what you want.

Answer 7

Choose between Rails and Django. They both have different strengths. I like Rails better in general, but Django's admin interface can save you a lot of time when you need it.

Answer 8

There's another factor to take into consideration here: what are you the most familiar with? I believe that some studies have found upwards of a 30% loss of productivity when trying to learn a new language/framework.

Sometimes, there's nothing wrong with just sticking to what you know. But if you're interested in what languages/frameworks to learn, I'll refer you to the other posts because the above was the only thing I really have to add.

Answer 9

I recommend looking into Grails. It uses Groovy which is similiar to Java (so if you know this already you're good to go). Groovy runs on the JVM so you can still use all the great libraries already available for Java. Yet, since it's a dynamic language with a lot of the similar bells and whistles like Ruby you can use closures and that kind of neat stuff when you need/want to. And you're not slowed down by Java's traditonal slow compile-deploy-test development cycle.

Grails is already setup with Hibernate and Spring. You can create CRUD application in practically no-time (pretty much like Rails applications), and at the same time drill down and be able to control every little details since it's built on such proven and well-supported technologies. In addition there's literally hundreds of plugins available that helps you easily set up things like mailing lists, security, AJAX components and so on.

Otherwise, if you want to set up a community site and don't want to code a single line you could always check out ning.com.