Hi! I’m writing here because I would love to get your opinion on something. I’m want to build a website, kind of a blog mixed with ecommerce (shop with crm, only online products). After talking with a few developers most of them recommend a Wordpress with Woocommerce. Although some of them says that PHP framework (eg. Symfony) is going to be far better option for such a project. I would really appreciate your opinion on that. Which one would you recommend: WP or Symfony? And why? A little bit more about my website: blog: I’m going to post a few types of content, each type has a different layout, shop: 40+ products in 3 categories. After a purchase customer gets an access to a product page (videos, text, JPGs, PDFs), landing pages for products must be highly customizable (something like a WP’s page builder seems nice to me) because each product is different and also I’m going to do a lot of A/B testing, speed: I’m going to use a cloud servers but website itself has to be very fast, efficient database: because it’s going to grow, more content, products, customers and orders. Not super fast, but constantly. So what would you recommend and why?
First and foremost, you should reconsider your idea about different layouts for products and pages/blog posts. If it's too different, it will make the site seem like a haphazard mix of content. Second, there is no similarities between WP (which is a CMS) and for instance Symphony (which is a framework) - the first can be put up and get up and running with almost no coding, while the other can be used to achieve the same as you can do with WP (with little work), but with coding everything from scratch, including the adminpanel etc. Third: 40+ products is nothing. Seriously. It's as close to an empty database as you can get, almost. Until you get thousands of products, performance shouldn't be a problem. Fourth: if you need easily customizable landing pages, and plan on using something like Symphony, someone has to either build you a page builder, or you'll have to teach yourself HTML/CSS so you can make your landing pages (with code). Fifth: speed. Wordpress is never gonna be fast. It can be usable, of course, but it will probably never be really fast. That can be better with for instance a site built with some sort of framework, but there's no guaranteee. Sixth: efficient database. Well, using Wordpress gives you little control over the database, but for instance WooCommerce has been used for a long time, for much larger sites than you're starting out with, and it works okay. Building it yourself is no guarantee you'll get a better / faster database, since that depends on the knowledge of the DB admin/coder you hire. Creating a proper, well-working database is not an easy task. Ease: Wordpress with WooCommerce Symphony: if you want to use a framework, it's not the worst, not the best - it'll do, but you'll need a coder who knows the framework Best solution: if you know you want to do the coding, then why use a framework? Just code it in PHP