I'm in the process of developing a social media-ish site built around
WordPress and VBulletin forum. A site where a visitor has a username and
password and their own "page" on the site where various site
interactions take place. I need a CMS framework to tie them all together
along with other features like multimedia, video uploading/severing/,
news/articles/information as well as user/visitor created content ala/
wiki's. I'll need a user-friendly backend to control the functionality.
(aside from Wordpress and VBulletin's existing backends)
Would ROR be suited for this sort of development? I'm going to be hiring
a developer very soon and would like to have some honest opinions from
those that know the platforms best. My current direction has me leaning
toward Joomla or Drupal but I've heard so much about ROR lately, I want
to find out more about it and if it's the best choice for my project.
Utilizing Wordpress & VBulletin together with Rails isn't the best
idea. It's do-able but it's the way Rails was intended to be used...
so whoever does it will need to jump through hoops.
I'd recommend looking at Rails based alternatives. Beast & Rboard are
open source projects for forums. On the blogging side, there isn't
anything as nice as Wordpress on Rails but you might look at Typo,
Mephisto & BrowserCMS.
On the video uploading side, you've got Panda (http://pandastream.com)
you could utilize to upload & process videos.
For the rest of the project, Rails would be a good fit, particularly
since it sounds like you'll mostly be doing CRUD operations (Create,
Read, Update & Delete on records.)
Overall, my answer to your question is Yes. Rails is well suited for
your app.
Maybe a little offtopic, but does anyone else wish there was a filter
for this list?
Maybe something that would just bounce any posts with "hiring a
developer" and social (media|network|video) in them?
Are there really VCs out there with sufficiently severe craniorectal
inversion that they think they're really going to make "the next
Youtube+Facebook+Wikipedia+Twitter+Flickr"? I'd like to know, as I
missed out on the great deals on HK chairs during the last bust...
Are there really VCs out there with sufficiently severe craniorectal
inversion that they think they're really going to make "the next
Youtube+Facebook+Wikipedia+Twitter+Flickr"? I'd like to know, as I
missed out on the great deals on HK chairs during the last bust...
Those openings are not about re-inventing those killer apps. That would be daft.
Those openings are about figuring out new ways to spam them!
I'm in the process of developing a social media-ish site built around
WordPress and VBulletin forum. A site where a visitor has a username and
password and their own "page" on the site where various site
interactions take place. I need a CMS framework to tie them all together
along with other features like multimedia, video uploading/severing/,
news/articles/information as well as user/visitor created content ala/
wiki's. I'll need a user-friendly backend to control the functionality.
(aside from Wordpress and VBulletin's existing backends)
Would ROR be suited for this sort of development? I'm going to be hiring
a developer very soon and would like to have some honest opinions from
those that know the platforms best. My current direction has me leaning
toward Joomla or Drupal but I've heard so much about ROR lately, I want
to find out more about it and if it's the best choice for my project.
I hope to hear some good opinions. Thanks.
I'm new here, especially with rails - but understanding the MVC concepts
I would distinctly say "no". A CMS system tied around Vbulletin will
not work with rails because vbulletin was never designed with MVC in
mind. It would not mesh well with rails mainly because of the
following:
1) It's PHP and not MVC driven.
2) It utilizes hooks and plugins to modify code areas to your site
(which would not be rails compatible).
You are better off going with a completely new rails project environment
from scratch or if you must use vbulletin then go with a vbulletin based
CMS like VBadvanced..
Since I'll be integrating with VBulletin I'll probably go with Drupal
for this project. I am interested in Rails however and had I not needed
to integrate VBulletin I probably would have chosen to build the entire
thing from the ground up in Rails.
Just a thought, but it almost sounds like you're just more interested
in using an application framework, not sure why Rails-specific. **
Please don't shoot the blasphemist ** but if you want to stick with
PHP-based applications (like WordPress and Drupal, etc...) you might
be better off at looking at PHP-based frameworks, like Django or
CakePHP (or even mojave, yuck)... Again, just a thought. Not trying
to steer you away from using Rails, but if you hire a developer one
way or the other (i.e. PHP vs. Rails) they are quite possibly going to
need ramp-up time on the other. There are a lot of developers out
there that are multi-faceted and seasoned enough to know both, but
there are a lot MORE that know one or the other much better. So if
your intent really is to hire "one" developer, you might just need to
choose your battle: Go with PHP and find a PHP developer who will do
it all, or try to learn Rails from ground-up, implement PHP-based
applications, and try to find a Rails developer that knows enough PHP
to do multi-system integration.
