3 ms·

Ask HN: CMS and Shopping Carts? (from the view of a web developer)

3 points by mcav 17y ago

I graduated from college this past year, so I've just begun working full time on my web startup. I just consulted with a couple of high school band directors who want to redesign their web site. They're asking for advice and/or someone to do it. I've agreed to consult with them a bit to give advice on their options, but have not yet offered to undertake the job myself. Their current site is just static pages maintained by a volunteer; they want to be able to edit their own content and sell products and stadium tickets on their new site. As a web (Pylons) developer, I know how to create completely custom sites, but I am unfamiliar with the landscape of CMS and E-Commerce solutions out there. Two questions: 1. What CMS and/or E-Commerce products out there would you recommend for something like this? 2. Should I accept this side project myself (if the CMS/e-commerce isn't hard to maintain) or should I continue focusing exclusively on my startup? (I suppose I should consider time, energy, cost... Gut instinct says to keep my focus, but the experience/name-dropping might be beneficial in the long run)

SwellJoe 17y ago
I've been through the CMS selection process five times now, and it's always turned out bad, until the most recent selection. I've heavily used (as in, built and launched a site used by thousands of people every day) Zope, Plone, OpenACS, Joomla, and now Drupal, and experimented with (as in, installed and tinkered with for a few days just to get a feel for) a half dozen others. I think Drupal is actually going to work for us for years to come; while every other CMS I've ever launched a site on has immediately shown itself to be really problematic once it was being used by a lot of people. It is the least frustrating, the best supported by its community, the most actively developed by competent developers (Joomla seems to have a lot more third party developers, but they seem to predominantly be web designers turned developer, and their inexperience shows in the extremely poor quality of most modules for Joomla). We've had it in service for a couple of months now, and I spent a lot more time evaluating and developing for it before choosing it than any other CMS I've deployed, and its flaws are the least offensive and the easiest to fix or workaround of any of the ones I've used, so far. Ubercart is the nicest to customize and extend of any of the CMS shopping carts I've used, and also seems to be developed and maintained by competent, friendly people. Getting commercial support for the code from competent core developers has also proven much easier than for any of the other CMS I've used (with the possible exception of Zope/Plone; the Zope people are top-notch and fantastic to work with, though not cheap, and I found I needed help a lot more than I liked because the docs were out of date and inaccurate and they've reinvented every wheel so existing knowledge, like of relational databases, doesn't map to Zope/Plone). Anyway, our new site is also the hardest working of any CMS-based site I've ever built. It is expected to do more: forums, ticket tracker, ecommerce with quite a lot of customization for license management, documentation, extensive and heavily used email notifications (we send thousands of notification emails every single day, and while it's not perfect, Drupal is the most flexible and generic of all of the notification systems I've used). It's probably worth mentioning that I don't like PHP as a language (I would choose Perl, Python, Ruby, or pretty much anything else, over PHP, if I were only selecting based on the implementation language). Despite that, Drupal is what I selected. I guess that's a pretty ringing endorsement. I'm not even going to try to tell you what to do on question 2.
yannis 17y ago
If I was you I would take it just for the experience. I would use Drupal for the CMS. From what you describing should take you two-three weeks to learn Drupal and redesign the site.

3 points by mcav 17y ago

SwellJoe 17y ago

I've been through the CMS selection process five times now, and it's always turned out bad, until the most recent selection. I've heavily used (as in, built and launched a site used by thousands of people every day) Zope, Plone, OpenACS, Joomla, and now Drupal, and experimented with (as in, installed and tinkered with for a few days just to get a feel for) a half dozen others. I think Drupal is actually going to work for us for years to come; while every other CMS I've ever launched a site on has immediately shown itself to be really problematic once it was being used by a lot of people. It is the least frustrating, the best supported by its community, the most actively developed by competent developers (Joomla seems to have a lot more third party developers, but they seem to predominantly be web designers turned developer, and their inexperience shows in the extremely poor quality of most modules for Joomla). We've had it in service for a couple of months now, and I spent a lot more time evaluating and developing for it before choosing it than any other CMS I've deployed, and its flaws are the least offensive and the easiest to fix or workaround of any of the ones I've used, so far. Ubercart is the nicest to customize and extend of any of the CMS shopping carts I've used, and also seems to be developed and maintained by competent, friendly people. Getting commercial support for the code from competent core developers has also proven much easier than for any of the other CMS I've used (with the possible exception of Zope/Plone; the Zope people are top-notch and fantastic to work with, though not cheap, and I found I needed help a lot more than I liked because the docs were out of date and inaccurate and they've reinvented every wheel so existing knowledge, like of relational databases, doesn't map to Zope/Plone). Anyway, our new site is also the hardest working of any CMS-based site I've ever built. It is expected to do more: forums, ticket tracker, ecommerce with quite a lot of customization for license management, documentation, extensive and heavily used email notifications (we send thousands of notification emails every single day, and while it's not perfect, Drupal is the most flexible and generic of all of the notification systems I've used). It's probably worth mentioning that I don't like PHP as a language (I would choose Perl, Python, Ruby, or pretty much anything else, over PHP, if I were only selecting based on the implementation language). Despite that, Drupal is what I selected. I guess that's a pretty ringing endorsement. I'm not even going to try to tell you what to do on question 2.

yannis 17y ago

If I was you I would take it just for the experience. I would use Drupal for the CMS. From what you describing should take you two-three weeks to learn Drupal and redesign the site.