[The 7th Sage]

Been working with PHP for sometime now, although I've never had a live site of any big projects. Right now I want to make a really basic CMS similar to http://www.goodreads.com/ in a different niche.

Some features I need are
- Register/login
- User panel
- Category Page with links to all Categories
- Article page with links to all Articles.
- User friendly URLS
- Search according to keywords, tags.
- Clean and Secure code on the front end and back end.


I know Joomla and Drupal will be able to do most or all of these but I do not like those since they have some performance issues. I like MODX they allow you to do most of the front end code but I'm not confident on whats on the backend. (Dislike Wordpress as a CMS)

So which one do you think is a better approach? Custom CMS or a prebuilt CMS?

[Shining White]

Well Um not Good at PHP . Joomla or Wordpress (if take as CMS) are better i say if using ,
Wordpress have more cool template now

but i think with security and day by day 0days and other exploit discovering its better to develop a cms or custome something ,

i am developing for my clients with jsp+other server side css,ajax,html (IDE:-netbeans) coz Java is the only well knows programing language for me , easy to connect with databases . and customizing the pages as own ,

i think its not hard to doing above things you want as registration , search , custom links , also with php ,

So my vote is going to NOT a prebuilt one ,

[The 7th Sage]

Wordpress just doesn't fit my strategy. Its a fine system but its not what i am looking for. I have worked with JSP and servlets, but I'm not very comfortable with it as I am with PHP. JSP does have its advantages over PHP, I'll give you that but I'm looking for a very small system with possibility of being ported to web hosts free of JVM dependencies. I think its more suited to bank, ecommerce applications than small articles publishing system which doesn't contain any sensitive data other than user passwords. But i'll still take a look into it. :-)

[Frooxius]

If you really want to get maximum performance, then building your own CMS optimized to do only these things is probably the way to.

However I think that properly configured Drupal shouldn't have big performance issues on a good hosting (I use it myself), you just have to be careful with what modules you activate (also keep in mind, some modules need to be on only for development!) and you can use it's caching abilities as well. Plus Drupal is very modifiable, meaning you can use PHP to modify it in many ways like a modelling clay.

You can throw away the stuff you don't need. Drupal is one of the most flexible and powerful CMS' that I know.

If you write your own system for this stuff, you'll be essentially reinventing a wheel. A smaller and smoother wheel to these existing ones, like specifically tailored for your car, but question is: is it worth the time?

Maybe you could tell more about the requirements of the project, where it's going to be hosted, what time you have for it and such, to make a better guess.

[The 7th Sage]

-My essential needs are minimum http requests, low page size.

-My second need is users should be able to create account on the website and be able to post articles, which will be published on approval of admin.

-Lastly a page which links all the articles, similar to http://www.wikihow.com/Category:Basic-Computer-Skills

I came across this page http://erickennedy.org/Drupal-7-Reasons-to-Switch and some other responses from Drupal users saying the new Drupal versions were extremely slow. I've never really used Drupal myself so you can tell me if this is true.