David Emery Online

Web Application Development

30 April 2007

On Friday we launched a new site for the wonderful Emma Pollock. We’re still using Textpattern to base most of our sites on, and this one is no exception. We’ve taken a good look into most of the rivals recently, and none of them seem to offer the same combination of flexibility and ease of use.

We’ve tried Wordpress for a couple of sites and to be perfectly honest I’ve not been impressed. Sure, the admin skin looks slightly nicer then Textpattern’s yellow tabs, but it doesn’t seem to be as flexible, and scatters options for things all over the place. The hype in this case doesn’t seem to be justified.

We’ve also been looking at Drupal, more for community-based sites like what we’ve created for iLiKETRAiNS. In the end though – for the time being at least – Drupal is just too complicated. I have no doubt that Drupal could do everything we’d ever want it to do and more, but we simply don’t have the time right now to invest in getting up to speed with the way it works – for iLiKETRAiNS we ended up writing a custom solution using PHP instead, as that turned out to be quickest.

We also have a whole host of more complicated sites coming up – more applications I guess then a traditional news-based site (although that’s certainly an aspect of what we’re going to do). Currently, we’re seriously eying up Django as the framework to base things on. It seems to have a very nice balance between making things easy (like the full admin interface) and giving you complete control, with the added bonus of being based on Python and hence having lots of pre-built bits of code it can use.

We’ve currently dismissed Ruby on Rails – which was our first choice – due to a combination of the difficulty in deployment and that it doesn’t appear that we’d gain a significant amount more from using that vs a PHP-based framework, and we’d have the added overhead of learning Ruby (currently we’re all PHP). In fact, if anyone has any recommendations on PHP frameworks I’m all ears – Symfony looks interesting, as does CakePHP but I’d really like to hear some personal opinions before I jump in.

Any and all thoughts and opionions are welcome – what is the best way to rapidly develop custom web based applications in 2007?