

Ask HN: Arguments for/against web templates - tgrass

I am a civil engineer (hydrology). I've learned enough CSS, Js, PHP and MySQL on my own time to build what I want, how I want. My employer is interested in a website to handle floodplain queries. I'm comfortable with the project (especially since we are not an IT shop, and I was not hired for web dev, it's understood it could take some time). I've worked with geospatial data in OpenLayers and am learning the spatial functions in MySQL.<p>My concern is: since we are not an IT shop, it seems likely someone else here will suggest using a ready-made template. My gut reaction is: I'd spend more time learning what the template was doing than I would if I just built from the ground up.<p>So I am asking for arguments for and against using a web-site template for a geospatial database.<p>Thanks for any help.
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pierrefar
If you find an acceptably-licensed template, why not? To save yourself time in
terms of learning what it does, pick a simple one. A simple way to check:
check its source code and see how much you quickly understand it.

Also, why not outsource this bit of the project?

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frankwiles
Off topic, but if you're doing spatial stuff you should really be using
PostgreSQL and PostGIS. Much better feature set and performance for those
types of queries.

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tgrass
Thanks. Noted.

