Thread

I’m making a fairly simple webpage as a graduation thesis. The problem is, that I don’t know whether I should choose a CMS, a framework or to program everything from scratch in PHP.

The site will be a database for video game music concerts. Anyone can add and edit concerts. This is the site’s structure in a nutshell.

Home Page
- Search bar
- Advanced search -button
- Add new concert -button

Advanced search page
- The following criteria can be specified in the advanced search:
—- date, country, city, artist, which game etc.

Add new concert page
- The above mentioned things can be added

Concert page
- The above mentioned things are visible
- Edit concert -button

Edit concert page
- Information can be edited and saved
- Revert changes -button/list
- Delete concert -button

I’m not sure yet what users will have rights to add, edit and delete concerts. This site will be a subdomain and I was thinking that users will register in the main domain. That way I will only need a login-box.

I’m quite the beginner and I’m trying my best to investigate different options. From school I have some experience in PHP, MySQL, WordPress and Drupal. But I have never used a framework before. These are the answers and thoughts I’ve received from other people:

1) With WordPress it’s difficult to make a user-contributed webpage. It will become slow and unreliable.
2) But a CMS is a stable solution, because updates are made automatically. Without a CMS it might be a lot of work to update to the newest PHP or add FB Like-buttons etc.
3) Frameworks are more flexible and lend themselves great for sites with a specific purpose.
4) No one has ever recommended that I code everything from scratch. (Though I think it could be a good learning experience)

I would really appreciate any help. I do have over half year of time to make this, but I want to get started already!

My two cents; you need to be fairly proficient at PHP in order to adequately use a PHP based framework.  Knowing PHP will help you understand how much work the framework takes off your shoulders.

  That said, if you feel comfortable using raw php to code your project, it would be a ‘great learning experience’, which means it would probably take longer than the framework, but would give you the experience you need to later use the power of frameworks like Codeigniter.

Which Framework?  Given that you have enough php experience, I DO recommend CI, because it has a shorter learning curve and a smaller code footprint.  Plus this set of fora is available to help you through the tough spots.

  The downside to your situation is that you may want to use some the more esoteric features of PHP which are not well supported in CI.  You can still use them with CI, but they are not part of the native core libraries and you may need to extend those core classes.  CI allows this, so this is not a show-stopper.