Where do I start?

[ChrisHunt]

OK guys, I've had this idea for a new site for ages, but I'm not sure just how to go about it. I'm gonna obscure some of the details but you should get the general idea...

I want to create an online directory of widget sellers. There are a few hundred of them in the UK, but they are currently split between several different sites. Mine will list them all, with cool stuff like Google Maps to help folks find them. A plain listing will be free, but shop owners can pay me an annual fee for an enhanced listing which they can edit themselves. Visitors can vote and comment on the shops they like best/worst.

In addition there'll be a forum and a blog for widget-related discussion and news. I want to use a single user sign-on system to grant access to all these functions - voting, discussing, managing your own shop's entry.

All my previous projects (apart from a couple of wordpress blogs) have been pretty much written from the ground up in Perl. I suppose I could do that here too, but it seems like a lot of work when there's so much open source goodness out there.

Does anybody out there have any suggestions for products/platforms I might use? I have access to MySQL and all the usual LAMP stuff. Web host has just made Ruby on Rails available too, which might do the trick. What do you think?

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

One thing to consider is scalability. If you're not going to be getting too many hits (e.g. 1000/day or less), then something like PHP & MySQL would be just fine.

If you're going to be getting a lot more, for example, 100,000/day, then you might want to consider something like Java/JSPs with MySQL & Apache for static content.

I've no idea about Ruby or how well it scales, but from talking to some bods at work, they're pretty sceptical.

Dan



Coedit Limited - Delivering standards compliant, accessible web solutions

[tt]Dan's Page [blue]@[/blue] Code Couch

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[ChrisHunt]

Thanks Dan, I don't think I'll be doing stellar amounts of traffic anytime soon. If I do, my cheap-and-cheerful hosting set up is likely to be as much of a problem as the language chosen.

That said, 1000 hits/day seems like a pretty pessimistic upper limit for a PHP+MySQL set up. That's only one hit every minute and a half or so - which any server ought to be able to keep up with. Are you sure you didn't mean 1000 hits an hour?

Anyway, I've had a bit of an epiphany on this one. My original thinking was "The index of widget shops is the core content, the blog and forum are peripheral - how can I bolt the blog & forum bits on to use the same user logon as my main shop index system?"

Now I've taken a different tack: a blog and a forum are fiddly to write - with all the complications of RSS and comments and what-not, but there are plenty of ready-made open-source ones available for free. The widget shops system is comparitively simple to design and build (I'm really a database designer by trade). So all I need to do is turn the problem around and borrow the blog's user authentication routine to use in my custom shop index system. That way I can build on the Wordpress knowledge I already have, rather than doing something totally new.

Does that sound like a good plan?

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

It does. In fact we've just finished skinning a WordPress site and adding our own custom extensions to allow for custom content for a client... it was a whole load easier than trying to interface WordPress onto our own CMS.

Dan



Coedit Limited - Delivering standards compliant, accessible web solutions

[tt]Dan's Page [blue]@[/blue] Code Couch

http://www.codecouch.com/dan/

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