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phpruby-on-railswordpressforumvbulletin

Technology stack selection : PHP, Ruby on Rails with World Press

I have to create a web site with the functionality of similar to some e-commerce website, but it will also have a user forum and the users will have ability to write blogs/articles. I will also have a mobile app (hybrid app for iOS and android), so I want my server side Rest APIs to be re-usable from my web front as well as from mobile app perspective (not 100% but at least the platform and technology I want to be same, so it will be easy for me to write back end code for my website and mobile app).

With above in my mind, I would prefer to leverage something like world press , as it will save me a lot of design and tempting time for my website and it also have forum plugins etc. I am the single developer who will be doing everything.

My questions are as below :

  1. If I go with World press, my only technology options are PHP/MySQL, is it correct? if yes, then how good the idea is to create REST APIs in PHP? up to what extend World press gives me option to write my custom code and customize my website from coding perspective?
  2. Is Ruby on Rails a better fit for this scenario? can I use RoR with World Press? How are RoR server side REST APIs in terms of performance?
  3. Not leaning towards the Node js solution as my use cases are not really heavily real time features, but more of a CRUD operations, and on top of that I will not be able to leverage any CMS such as World Press in this case.
  4. For forum, is it a good idea to leverage some plugin such as bb press, or vBulletin? any other better option? I think writing of all the forum functionality from scratch won’t be a good idea.

Any guidance will be highly appreciated.

Thanks.

Solution

  • Well ok maybe I get the reversal badge for this I will answer your questions:

    1. WordPress, the CMS you are probably talking about, is written in PHP. MySQL is the usual way to go. You could also run it with PostgreSQL as DB for instance but it may complicate things further.

    REST APIs can be created in almost any programming language. There is nothing wrong with creating those in PHP.

    You can customize WordPress to the end of the world (press) if you have the programming skills to do that. However it is not recommendable to use WordPress for certain use cases e.g. big e-commerce websites as there are limits/challanges in scalability and performance.

    1. The choice between Ruby on Rails and PHP is dependent on the project requirements. Both languages have advantages and disadvantages. WordPress is written in PHP. Compared to PHP Ruby on Rails is better in terms of performance. However this largely depends on the source code written.

    2. The choice of the library to be used for a forum depends on your project requirements. It is probably not a good idea to write a forum software from scratch. However I do not know your requirements.

    Final suggestion: Try to minimize your project requirements and use the most simple (but sufficient) approach you can find.