I've got an upcoming, personal project that could be done with WordPress and a stack of plugins but a) bloat; and b) clashes are putting me off. I could look at Joomla, it's been a while... Or I could just open up cakePHP and code the whole thing. It'll have an app with it, so needs to have an API. The security side of that is a concern. No budget, it's all the opportunity cost of my time, although I do have deadlines... What would you do?
What type of project? I'd try to find an existing, tested script that more or less fits my needs and modify it.
Essentially it's a directory but I haven't found any directory software that fits. I could kind of hobble together some hive directory plugins with some woocommerce and buddy press then write plugins to fill the gaps but there are so many compromises. It just feels like the code might be cleaner if I DIY. One thing I haven't seen WP do is limit the visibility of media to a custom post. That will be essential. I actually looked at contentful but really couldn't see what they brought to the party.
If you have complete plan for website then custom is always better than open source ........ If you will try to full fill your requirement by creating any plugins or modify in script of website then these will also charge you extra. So, i will say according to my experience that compromise for few features but if its not enough and these features are essential ..... then try to create your own ... A bit time taken but satisfaction guarantee because you know very well what you need
Yeah, loading speed would be better if you built it from scratch. Although it would be a lot faster and easier to get your site up and running with WordPress and plugins. I guess you need to weigh the pros and cons of each decision. WordPress has come a long way with Gutenberg, you really don't need to use bloated page builders like Elementor if you want good loading speed. If it was me, I would probably just try to make it work with WordPress and WooCommerce BEFORE coding something from scratch. You could always use a super minimal theme for better loading speeds as well.
The editing process doesn't really worry me, most of it will be "headless" and maintained via an app - it's having the API calls I can make and something structuring the data correctly. Like woo-commerce knows what data I need to store to construct a card and process a payment - I just need to call the right function and pass the right attributes. BuddyPress manages all the friend request & acceptance stuff - but is it that hard to recreate? Especially when there's a good portion of BuddyPress that I'll want to hide. And custom fields - a standard blog record doesn't hold the right info so it'll need extending. On top of that, I haven't seen version control in any directory plugins - I want my advertisers to be able to have a draft listing that they can work on before they set it live. That's a crucial difference to a traditional directory. I've started looking at Laravel, to compare it with CakePHP. I'm not sure, for this project, that it adds anything special but it's worth taking a look. It's good typing this all out. Clarifies some of my concerns. I also took another look at Joomla and ExpressionEngine but that seems like opening up a new level of risk with plugins that don't have the reputations of woo-commerce and BuddyPress.
I just discovered RealWorld which looks like an amazing way to test different systems. See https://thinkster.io/tutorials/fullstack Essentially they build the same website over and over so that it appears to be identical but they use different frameworks. Clever. FRONTENDS React / Redux AngularJS Angular 2+ BACKENDS Node.js Django Rails