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Comment by joshfinnie | Hacker News Reader

Working on a few things:

Starting to get the word out for GISQuery.com, a Q&A site for GIS professionals using OSQA. Having an interesting time getting the word out on this one since I need participation for the site to grow.

Learning CodeIngniter as a PHP framework to help get a few other ideas off the ground (a revamped 140Pl.us and a new beer website). I am getting tired of trying to build highly functioning sites from scratch so I thought I'd try a framework.

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Why create this site when a GIS site is quickly approaching beta on stack exchange. I'd imagine most people would use that site over GISQuery.com, and the quality of Q&A sites is directly related to the size of the community.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1425/geographic-in...

Honest question. Why make this site?

This is a good question. I think StackOverflow is great for what it is, but I think the success has come from the founders being rooted in the topic at hand.

Now that StackExchange has changed its view and are attempting to start other topics in the same vain, I feel that there is room for someone more invested in the topic to moderate a Q&A type website. I have no fear that the "Web Applications" "Gaming" and "Pro Webmasters" topics are going to work great, but I am interested to see how "Food and Cooking" is going to go.

Also, I am a big proponent of letting the website try and live. The GIS StackExchange committal project has been going on for almost a month and it's only at 81% there. Hopefully my connections in the GIS world can get GISQuery more than 500 people interested in it.

I'd be curious to hear what you think of CodeIgniter, I have heard good things. We've been using CakePHP for about 3 years now, and would highly recommend it as a general purpose PHP framework.

Codeigniter is great, I have built small micro cms setups and large, advanced apps with it, and it's been easy to use every step of the way. Forums are good, docs are great, lightweight.

I am not going to lie, I chose CodeIgniter over CakePHP because I found some cool video tutorials on CodeIgniter the day I was most interested and went from there. So far, I like it; but, that might just be liking the MVC model.

The CI videos are great. I got a better (basic, admittedly) grip on MVC in 20 minutes than I did in a year of essays, forum posts and lectures.

I used CakePHP for a small project about a year and a half ago. I was totally frustrated by the lack of accurate up-to-date documentation and tutorials. Granted, it was my first time working with MVC, but a few months later I went to RoR and picked it up in no time flat.

Have the docs and tutorials improved at all for Cake?

I can highly recommend CodeIgniter for small sites. I've been using it for a few projects now and the workflow has gotten pretty smooth.

I would recommend Symfony as a PHP framework.

I like symfony as well but as of late I've found several things in the documentation to be segmented - such that you need to read around in several parts to find the secret recipe that actually works. I'm planning to contribute to the docs soon hopefully but with a brand new baby boy I haven't had a tremendous amount of time.

I've discovered Kohana recently and it looks promising and the only HMVC Framework I know. As for the Symfony doc, I think it is wonderful ... offering free online books is one of the main reason for its popularity.

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