Laravel or Wordpress?

Hello, I am looking to have a website developed and I am not sure which route should I take. I am not a developer so my knowledge on this topic is non-existent. I have been told the functionality I need can be achieved with both. While in wordperss it will be cheaper and faster to develop, with laravel it will be done properly rather then slapped together with various plugins. Any insight on this from someone knowledgable? Website I am going for has a similar functionality to teespring.com
Thank you

 

You can't compare the too. It's like comparing a Bird to a Rubber Ball.

WordPress is a blogging platform. Because it was cleverly designed to support "plug ins" and the code allows you to easily extend the functionality it's often used as a CMS. With that said, if you are looking for a web site where you can edit your own pages, easily download drop in plug ins, and customize the code WordPress is not a bad choice.

Laravel is an MVC framework. Laravel provides an infrastructure to your web app which allows the developer to focus on creating the app and not wasting too much time with the internals (code design, security, communicating with databases, configuration, templating, etc). If you are looking for a completely customized solution that another programmer can take over and easily extend Laravel is a smart choice. Going this route will certainly cost more money.

 

As you're not developer, go with Wordpress. @NetStar point it well.

Regards.

 

I couldnt have said it any better @NetStar The two are not comparable. apples to oranges.

 

That really depends on your own skills set and your strengths.

If your strengths are technical, go with laravel; otherwise if you are better at writing content, go with WP.

Don't wire yourself up in something you are not prepared for. Spend your time on what you are best at.

 

Laravel is used to make web based applications - full blown dating sites, social network sites, web apps with statistics - etc. Now wordpress CAN give you statistics and you can generally put together a webapp - but it wouldnt really be as capable as the laravel site. Loads of plugins and support communities but it is meant to be what it is, a blogging platform.

 

This was a poor response.

A Webapp is simply a web application. Whether it's a WordPress site or a PHP script that uses an MVC framework it's a webapp. You can have statistics for both. As far as the capability.... Laravel isn't a platform. It's only an internal library that provides a design pattern and modules for a developer. WordPress straight out of the box gives you a solution you can immediately use via point and click.

 

I recommend WordPress because it will be quicker to set up and you will be able to manage your website and contents very easily. You will also be able to find many helpful plugins to achieve your tasks, just keep them updated to avoid getting hacked.

 

okay so perhaps not the correct way to put it - lets try it this way instead;

wordpress was designed as a blogging software - as you mentioned laravel a framework. These two should not be compared for the same web site, application, etc. Generally speaking if you were to build a web app using wordpress - do you feel you could maximize the capability of that particular site such as you could if you built the same site using a laravel framework?

 

As a developer I think laravel is a good framework and wordpress is one of the first cms/application(Whatever you want to call it) I have worked on and is very easy to use out of the box/with plugins or extend with writing your own plugins - then again this is coming from me as a developer.

In reality, It comes down to your business requirement, so go with what saves you time, money and not cause much heartache(There is always heartache when using a framework/cms/cmf) in the long run.

Now on to your question, I definitely wouldn't use Wordpress for a teespring.com clone, Not sure about Laravel either. I would go with a framework to build my website and I think the framework would be Yii2. If I really needed to stick to a cms I would go with Drupal 7 which is a cms + framework.

 

Wordpress has tons of already made and FREE plugins. You can easily add functionalities to your website with these plugins.

 

You should go with Wordpress. It's cheaper and reliable as well.

 

To me this is like asking "Would you like a shotgun to the head or the heart?" - both result in absolute rubbish websites that usually cost more to host, more to maintain and more importantly, conversions and/or visitor retention. Probably stems from that the concept of such systems are inherently flawed if you care at ALL about accessibility or efficiency, and that the people writing them usually don't know enough about HTML, CSS, PHP or Scripting to be developing a blasted thing for anyone else.

View source the default code from either of them to see said "epic fail" in action. That anyone would use them by choice just shows that apathy, ignorance and wishful thinking wins out over sane and rational thought every time.

 

This sounds ridiculous. You probably should actually take a look at the code of Laravel. It's definitely not rubbish code made by a non-developer. In fact, Laravel is one of the few frameworks out there for PHP that is logical. I totally agree with you that frameworks are often overkill and often the hassle/excessive resources and boat load of dependencies rarely outweigh the benefit. However, they DO serve a purpose and save you a lot of time from rolling out your own untested virgin solution. If you have ever worked in a collaborative programming environment it's crucial to have a strict design pattern. I'm against and for frameworks. I have a love hate relationship with them for probably similar reasons you have shared. Laravel isn't some rubbish coded POS though. It's intelligently written by a developer.

 

Go to the website FOR Laravel... not only is it an inaccessible train wreck of artsy fartsy BS that is the typical laundry list of how NOT to design a websites with it's fixed metric fonts, illegible colour contrasts and little if anything of value on the home page other than marketspeak (that trips my BS alarm... "web artisans" - RIGHT), they aren't doing a blasted thing that warrants the presence of JS which of course is why they have 200+k of it in 3 files, 43k of CSS in 2 files that with such an absurdly simple (and painfully bad) layout has no excuse to be more than half that, the markup is the typical disaster of "semantics, what's that?" mated to scripting only elements in the markup mated to endless pointless DIV for nothing, endless pointless classes for nothing, endless pointless HTML5-tard redundancies dragging coding practices back to the WORST of 1997 development practices...

About the only GOOD thing I can say about the home page to Laravel's site is at LEAST it's only 326k in 18 files; too bad there's NO real excuse given what's being done there for it to be more than 100k in 10 files!

.... and I'm supposed to trust people with this level of front-end developer ineptitude -- where they can't even meet the SIMPLEST of accessibility minimums -- with back-end code? Something that's ACTUALLY difficult? PLEASE.

But sure, let's talk their "logical" PHP; which when I say "logical" I'm sitting here with a cat on my lap raising my pinky to my upper lip. "laser"...

First off to even INSTALL this POS you need a even bigger steaming pile known as "Composer" - which naturally I so trust when every version number is 1.0.0_alphaPickANumber after some three years development. The moment you need a "dependency manager" I pretty much assume the code is rubbish or the group developing it has sucktastic communication skills; yes it's an assumption, but it's one based four decades of watching too many cooks in the kitchen without a Gordon Ramsey in the room to pimp-slap them into shape.

It also reminds me WAY too much of PEAR, where if I need to use PEAR to get it into PHP for me to use, I don't use it.

But, let's assume you actually get it working in something other than CentOS (which last time I tried to help someone with it was the ONLY actual answer that worked for getting "composer" installed), it just feels overthought; You'd almost think it was written by C++/*nix programmers who don't see anything wrong with X11 and have made up lame excuses for the *nix world desktop claiming it doesn't suck for two decades -- yes, it's THAT bad. The concept of "services' and "providers" reeking of the same client/server mentality that makes X11 implementations so useless you basically HAVE to run a toolkit on top of it (GTK, QT, SDL, Motif) so that mere mortals can make sense of it.

You start digging into the tutorials and code examples, much like MVC nonsense they seem to be trying to shoe-horn event driven "everything's an object" concepts into a language that wasn't designed for it. The result is bloated, slow and needlessly/pointlessly convoluted ways of doing even the simplest of tasks.

I wouldn't be recommending it to anyone, it ticks all the right boxes before I even get deep enough to build anything useful with it to throw my hands up in utter and complete disgust and walk away... Probably muttering "ignorant halfwit college-tard BS" under my breath; since it reeks of "You had to go to college to say something that stupid."

Of course that namespaces are another thing I think should be stricken from PHP as a bad idea is likely a major contributor to why it's unlikely I'd EVER warm to it. Going hand in hand with things like php shorttags, heredoc/nowdoc, allowing include/require to read any file with any extension, allowing readfile and fopen to touch files ending in .php, etc, etc... All disastrously bad ideas that really have no business in the language!

But more than the system itself, what I see vomited up as a result by the people using it does not convince me it's worth even looking at any more than any of the rest of these sleazy shortcuts that could only "save time" if you have no damned clue what you are doing!

 

Who cares about the front page of Laravel and how it's designed. That has nothing to do with their product which is an MVC framework for PHP. That's like calling Bentley a piece of shit automobile because their brochures didn't use a glossy print and fancy your individual preference.

As for CSS/JavaScript (which is not what my post was about that you commented on) there are tons of bad practices going on in most scripts, frameworks, libraries, concepts etc. Bad Practices are on most heavily traveled web sites but that doesn't mean the viewing experience or computer/server performance is affected in noticeable negative way. And please don't show me benchmarks and any sort of metrics to prove me wrong. Of course you can....but just like everyone else here we all visit those same sites daily without problem.

The truth is you don't need anything fancy, clever, or artsy for a web site. You can show 100% of your information using paragraph tags and bullets and the performance will be fantastic. However, now the experience is affected because it is...BORING.

 

It's indicative of their work, it should be the primary resource to learn to use it and to be frank it's a disaster on that front, and it's part of establishing trust. If they cannot handle something as simple as an accessible and useful front-end, we're REALLY supposed to trust that they have ANY clue what they are doing on the back end? BULL.

No, it's more like calling a Austin Princess a piece of shit automobile because the door handle came off in your hand, the ignition turns without keys in it, when the engine starts it shakes the sun-visor loose so it falls in your lap, and when you close the door after getting out the paint flakes off the door in one giant sheet because they skipped priming it.

Which is pretty much the *** you pal moment, don't let those pesky facts or the fact that such pages are USELESS to visitors like myself get in the way of sleazing out bloated slow train wrecks of web technologies that do nothing but over-complicate the simplest concepts. Whoopedy freaking-do, you can visit those sites without problems - so basically you're saying "plow anyone who has a problem"? Way to get fined in the UK. Way to alienate potential users. Way to screw over any client ignorant enough to be SCAMMED into using this crap.

Yeah, because it so hurts google search and craigslist.

... and I'm not saying you can't have that magical "user experience" -- but for Pesci's sake do so in a manner that gracefully degrades, doesn't require hundreds of files to do two-dozen or less files job, and doesn't leave people outside the "magical fantasy-land inside the wardrobe" of the perfect match of distance from host, speed of connection, latency of host and every hop to the server, device capabilities and usability needs high and dry.

Gonna go around tearing out handicapped ramps, ripping the braille off phone booths and doorways, and park in handicap spaces while you're at it?

 

Never heard about this Laravel but if you are comparing it wordpress then I can guess, what are you looking for and without checking about this Laravel on internet, I will suggest you wordpress. Afterall it is most famous CMS in the world.

 

Uhm... the insightfulness in the comments reach new levels every day. *headdesk*
My dear "Emily White" - Laravel is a framework - Wordpress is a CMS / blogplatform that has grown to big for its own good. They have nothing in common, except they're both built on PHP.