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My friend photographer asked me to develop a portfolio web site, and I'm wondering if a content management system (CMS) should be used for this purpose? The website contains a minimum of dynamic stuff, mostly just photo galleries and a "Contacts" page.

I have some experience in development using PHP frameworks (Yii and CI), so it makes me wonder what is the most effortless and effective way to do develop this:

  • a) use some kind of CMS (will take time and effort to learn and customize CMS to fit my needs)

  • b) develop a website from scratch using MVC framework (need to write more code, but more control over the development flow)

Any tips from people experienced in developing those kind of websites is much appriciated. Thanks.

toniedzwiedz
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Roman Kolpak
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6 Answers6

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I think the biggest benefit of using a CMS is that, once you've put the site together for them, you should be able to hand control of the site completely to your friend because a CMS will already have all of the admin interfaces worked out for (in your case) adding pictures and making other small changes to the site.

Even if you are good friends, the last thing that you want is an email every month just to add some more pictures to the site. Rolling your own admin interface is certainly possible, but it will take more time and will most likely not have as many options as most major CMS's will provide.

George
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Save yourself a lot of time and headache. There are some good CMS solutions for photography portfolio and they are pretty easy to learn. And your friend needs only standard, basic functionality (galleries, static pages and contact form), so there's no need to customize the code, only templates.

CMS platforms I would recommend:

Wordpress http://wordpress.org ZenPhoto http://zenphoto.org

Building a website with a solid CMS has lots of benefits, e.g. saves time, gives you all required tools, those CMSs are well tested, secure and stable (not all but WP and ZP definitely are), they provide SEO tools and SEO-ready code (if you choose or create proper theme/template) etc. And with both of these CMS platforms it's really easy to upgrade without any pain.

Ihor Vorotnov
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c) A mostly static site that only uses server-side code where absolutely required.

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
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With mvc frameworks you get URLs that reflect your controller and action structure. This is not 100% what you want for search engine optimization. You could write your own URL dispatcher of course, if you know how to do it. Frameworks are best suited for web applications and not websites.

So better use a cms. I heard that contao (formerly Typolight) should have most functions built in and should be easy to learn ( in a day or so )

yunzen
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If he is a photographer it's not a good way to use any auto-resizers that are built-in in many popular CMS, e.g. And you're right learning these CMS won't give you flexibility for further upgrades of the site (which cannot be avoided). So as a developer I always avoid Joomla and any like it. I don't have sufficient clearness and flexiblity with them, this is voice of my experience.

If you use Yii, I can offer you flexible extension exactly for your skills and situation:

AutoAdmin CMS framework for Yii

With it you can just design a database as you want, program front-end as you want (you're a programmer, aren't you?), and configure your back-end panel very quickly - exactly for your DB structure.

Or of course you may search something like it. Using Yii with extensions gives you a standartized site, which can be easily upgraded in future. Instead of Joomla-like systems which will always be oriented on customers of in-box solutions (with all following negative for skilled developers).

Alexander Palamarchuk
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I dont CMS is necessary here, but if you want to you can try using wordpress and install a built in theme something that suits photography.

defau1t
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