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Amanda Moore
4,151 PointsWhich would work better? Ruby or PHP
I have a site I want to develop and I am not sure which platform would be best. There will be a member profile in which they answer specific questions. I want the answers from those questions to show on the home page in a multi-column feed with a link back to the member profile with all of the questions/answers. I want facebook login and eventually there will be a voting component.
I haven't worked in Ruby yet so my instinct is to do a custom wordpress/php site but I am curious about Ruby and intend to start learning it anyway so it might be the better option.
I would appreciate any thoughts from those who have experience in both.
Thanks!
5 Answers
John Wheal
27,969 PointsI'd definitely check out the Treehouse Ruby courses. They take you through building a Facebook style website called Treebook which sound similar to what you're trying to achieve. I don't think using Wordpress would be a good idea, you would need to very heavily customize. I'd say Ruby on Rails is the way forward.
Suli S
1,475 PointsRuby on Rails ASP.NET Python
All these are good options. I recommend you to stay away of PHP. If you want to know why you can search the internet.
Kevin Korte
28,149 PointsI'd love to know you recommend to stay away from PHP? I've search the internet a many, and haven't found an answer for this.
Paul Graham
1,396 PointsIf you do search that, you'll mostly read a lot of dumb stuff from people that are language hipsters that don't understand much about programming.
Kevin Korte
28,149 PointsAny of the server side languages should be easily capable. It might be easier for you to get off the ground with RoR here, since a site like this would have features similar to what they teach in the RoR lessons here.
Patrick Metcalfe
Courses Plus Student 7,563 PointsAs Kevin mentioned any of the server side languages are capable of doing it, so your question really isn't concerned with which is most powerful or even easiest. I would say go with Ruby because you said your interested in it. I assume you know php, so why not challenge yourself. Its not even a real challenge if you want to do it anyways. I would satisfy your passion for Ruby because as Steve Jobs said, "find what you love, and do not settle." Passion is a rare thing and when you find it chase it down. I know my answer is a little different, but we are all here after all because in the end we have a passion for learning development/design.
Paul Graham
1,396 PointsCan you do this in WordPress? Almost certainly. Given the simplicity of the concept, not sure it's a great idea though. There are plenty of PHP frameworks out there that would be great for this (primarily Laravel comes to mind) if you already know PHP.
Language is not exactly a platform, there are many things to consider. For instance, what's your deploy target? If it's your own server, then you're free to do whatever you want. If you're using shared hosting, then you should strongly consider whether you're going to be able to get up to date Ruby tools. Ruby deployment is certainly more complex than PHP although with something like Passenger it's almost as easy.
If you know PHP already, I'd suggest trying to learn Laravel rather than learn a whole new technology stack with Rails.