Ask YC: Help Choosing A Platform | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Help Choosing A Platform

2 pointsjoeguilmette7 comments

I posted earlier asking how to approach Drupal. The response was wonderful, I truly appreciate it. It is now clear to me that Drupal can be a decent platform in the right circumstances.

My friend and I, while highly technical, lack experience programming. He has hacked up Drupal before and gotten a few sites up for activists to organize actions, so he knows a bit how to get modules working with each other. While he's never written any PHP or anything, he's pretty good with CSS and HTML.

The site we're going to be building is pretty basic. Users need the ability to create an account, and we are going to offer a service to verify their identity via certified mail. Thus, we're going to need to able to support user classes, and to 'lock' some of their profile info once they verify their info.

For the site itself, we really only need a robust Group featureset. Public and Private groups, each with a fairly large list of information. Also, we're going to need an email form with a few data fields that forwards to the owner of the group (and doesn't get picked up by spambots).

Also, we don't need to worry about scaling this at all. If people like the service, and actually use it, we're going to probably end up canning whatever we make right now and rewriting it in something else. If people actually use the service money to hire a small team won't be an issue.

How difficult will this be for 2 guys with little experience to figure out? We both have time, and have been working on this long enough that hitting a 2 week brick wall trying to get a module working will not deter us.

Any advice? Is there some other platform besides Drupal that is so much better that it will overcome the fact that our only experience is with Drupal?

Why don't you try it and see if you're able to put it together?

If you can't get it to work, you need to go back to the drawing board and either try something else, hire someone or learn how to work with Drupal's code.

That's the deal with being a "Hacker". You fiddle with something, and if it doesn't work you learn about the problem and tools and fiddle some more. There's no magic bullet to this, only hours of trying to get something to work.

Yes.

Relax. Don't fret. Use Drupal. :)

It seems like you might want to use Ruby on Rails because you can "describe" what you want to do and Rails will make the basic pages and database tables.

From what you are describing, what you are looking to do is very simple. There are probably examples that encompass most of the functionality you want to make. Look here for lots of free examples: http://www.codango.com/

You really have about three decent choices here: 1) PHP, 2) Ruby & Rails, 3) Python & Django

Of these three, I believe that PHP really is the best choice. While you could learn either of the other two technologies, you can find a number of books just on 'PHP and MySQL' and a heap of online documentation on the same. Additionally, there are hundreds of 3rd party modules and programs written PHP you can either integrate directly into your site or use to learn from. PHP will scale better than Ruby on Rails and is just as easy (some would say easier) to work with. It will have a much shorter learning curve than any of the Python frameworks and is also more forgiving of programming mistakes.

Beyond those three, several exotic choices exist such as Smalltalk/Seaside or PLT Scheme. However, documentation and third party modules won't be as readily available.

"robust Group featureset. Public and Private groups, each with a fairly large list of information."

It's unclear what this means - but the organic groups set of modules is probably as close as you will get in Drupal with existing modules.

if not, then I agree with nanijoe.

It may be time to hire a consultant :)

Why do that when they've got the time and inclination to educate themselves on what's required to build the site?

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