

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

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 <i>and/or</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Two questions:<p>1. What CMS and/or E-Commerce products out there would you recommend for something like this?<p>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)
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SwellJoe
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.

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yannis
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.

