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Originally Posted by Zorbfish
Agree with what Datschge wrote. While using an existing CMS may get you up and running faster I've found I usually regret the decision as it eventually gets in the way. You spend more time trying to bend it to your will instead of coding your features. Unfortunately by the time I realize this my project has become so tightly coupled to the CMS that I just start over. Maybe I just suck at webdev 
I prefer coding in Python. You might be interested in Django, Zope, or Pylons as web frameworks. |
I'll chime in and disagree with Zorbfish.
When I started to write Game Remixes (which also uses VGMdb data), I decided to write it from the ground up, using PHP, MySQL, and symfony as the only starting points. Now, something like 50,000 lines or 100,000 lines later, there is a website with a lot of code - but which I feel lacks key features that are provided by using existing software.
The biggest problem with technology today is that it changes too often. The problem isn't that technology is getting better too quickly - on the contrary, progress is always good. The problem is that there is far too much change that provides little or no improvement. Unnecessary changes in programming languages are one example; constant new features in eBay's already sufficient trading APIs are another.
For example, social networking is a huge time sink. Before, there used to be Google. Now, there is facebook. You now need to put "Like" buttons on all your pages in addition to search. facebook doesn't really provide any better of a service for finding websites than Google does, but it's different. Since I started from scratch, I had to waste many days adding all these social networking features to allow people to promote the site when the time would have been better spent implementing stuff like albums that actually pertains to music.
Similarly, when I resumed updating the site, I discovered that jQuery had been updated several versions. I put the new version of jQuery online, and it caused major bugs that caused DjTheSdotCom to be unable to spend his experience points. After jQuery, it was flowplayer, swfupload, and so on.
And then you have to deal with unique issues like GoDaddy upgrading PHP on its servers when your site relies on a quirk that existed in a previous version of PHP. You didn't know that it was a quirk at the time, so the website goes down. Had you used a third-party platform, chances are that an update would have been available that silently fixed this problem well before the old version of PHP became obsolete. You probably would never have even known the problem existed, nor would you have needed to know.
When you fit a working piece of software to your site and modify it, you basically get other people to do grunt work for you for free. If you create a forum based on phpBB, then chances are that someone else dealt with integrating facebook into phpBB. It may be difficult to shoehorn the other product into your solution, but you are able to spend your time working on the stuff that is important and makes your site unique, rather than worrying about security fixes, upgrading versions of components, and learning complicated third-party APIs.
I would be very wary of starting a big website from scratch today. At first, the freedom will be great - but after two or three years, you'll end up spending a huge amount of time simply upgrading your site to support the newest technologies and working out the bugs that occur during those updates. It's hard to stress this enough: you can lose an entire month going from one version of key software to the next. Open source developers are quick to remove backwards compatibility in favor of "progress."
Instead, devote a lot of research and find a platform that is stable and appears poised for continued development for at least a decade - and that has a proven history of backwards compatibility. Whether the platform continues to be actively developed or not is the most important decision you will make in the entire life of the website.