Date: 01/09/06 (PHP Community)    Keywords: cms, php, html, database, security, web

Hey all,

I know there's been a couple posts about this recently, so if I'm asking redundant questions, sorry.

A friend of mine has come up with a pretty novel idea for a MySpace-ish site, but for a specific niche market (kind of like those CatSpace and DogSpaces that exist) - users will have profiles, photos, a blog, message boards, send friend requests, yadda yadda yadda, you've seen it all before. I'm going to be developing the initial setup myself (since we have no money), and this is a somewhat long term project that I'll be picking at casually for a little while.

Right now I'm trying to figure out if I should give this a go coding from scratch, or use an existing CMS type solution (like Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, etc). I'd really like to code it myself, as I think it could be a fun project to work on. I'm a pretty solid PHP programmer, but as I have a feeling that this idea could jump in popularity pretty quick, I really want to make sure I keep this thing as efficient as possible for a large user base. For instance, I don't want to go making another MySpace which I think runs horribly as a web app compared to even LiveJournal.

Currently I use PEAR's DB_DataObject or my database interactions and I've just gotten into Smarty for templating, though I'm sure I'm not using either to their fullest potential. I saw mention of a couple of development environments and frameworks in someone's recent post looking for a visual studio-esque PHP environment - http://www.livejournal.com/community/php/388602.html but I've never used any of these.

I'm not really concerned here with using a "rapid development" framework - I don't mind coding, I like it - but what I'm really concerned with is stability, efficiency and security - I know of course that these also rely heavily on how well I code, and using a good coding environment or framework won't do the coding for me, but there have to be some tools/frameworks/etc out there that pros are using that I just haven't moved onto yet, and I wanted to see what you guys (and gals) are using on some of your bigger projects.


- I know this comes up a bunch, but does anyone else think would it be handy at all for us as a community to maybe organize some of the more useful threads and frequently asked (and answered) questions in the php community at a separate location? Doing just a search on the community doesn't necessarily give you anything about the quality of the responses, and it may even be nice to be able to 'browse' solutions/posts by categories or something; maybe we could have some sort of quality ranking on posts, or some way to identify posts that contain questions that get asked all the time. I don't think this would be too tricky to put together, and I'd be willing to work on it, but I don't know if anyone would even use it?

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/php/392457.html