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econne01 / Baseball-Saber-Scouting

This project will attempt to read various online Baseball data sources to create analysis for ourselves, the fans.
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Eric and Jake to research Joomla and druple...or other CMS tools. Please give some pros and cons of each from a development perspective here: #7

Open JaBaRo opened 11 years ago

econne01 commented 11 years ago

I'm going to try to address CMS decision as well as PHP vs Python in this same thread.

For PHP vs Python, from what I can tell, the general consensus is: both are good. But, PHP was designed for websites and to easily plug in with HTML, where Python is designed to be more an all-purpose coding language. Now, since we are actually doing a website, that might be fine.
Python generally thought to be slightly better structured/organized too. Couple points: Python has more flexibility in function parameters (easily defines optional parameters, default values, unspecified number of parameters). Python has explicit difference in Array Lists vs Dictionaries (List example [1, 2, 3] Dictionary example {1:'one', 2:'two', 3:'three'} PHP has more punctuation required, braces and semicolons. Some think this makes it easier because it is explicit about the end of a function or for-loop scope. (On the other hand, I like Python's simplicity too) http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonVsPhp

econne01 commented 11 years ago

Now for the CMS discussion.

I am unclear of what our motivation for using a CMS is? One of my goals with this project is to dive into the guts of a website to understand (and implement) better how sites work. So I don't want to hand over all the back end stuff to a CMS to manage the site design.

However, I also don't need to recreate the wheel on everything. Unfortunately this is a kind of a chicken or egg problem because I don't know all the things we want the site to do, and we won't til we get started, but we also can't get started until we pick a platform and it's hard to pick before we know what we want to do. Some things we may want, which can be handled by CMS's

Possible disadvantages to a CMS

It seems like the best reason to use CMS is when you have frequent updates and additions to the site, in terms of adding pages or blog entries. I don't think we will have that. * We will have new game analysis every day, so we WILL have new content, but I envision this as being automatically created, so we will not have to manually type in the new content as the CMS seems to be designed for?

I'm trying to keep an open mind, but pretty clearly failing. I am leaning toward not using one of the Drupal / Joomla platforms. What I did find about them was

  1. They are written in PHP, but does not restrict our choice of programming language
  2. I think Joomla looks more professional, but it's newer and seems like consensus is Drupal is easier to use

I also found Mezzanine (http://mezzanine.jupo.org/), which is a CMS that basically extends Django (the Python framework I started the project in already). I would be interesting in using this one since it hopefully means we could keep some of the work I already did.

JaBaRo commented 11 years ago

Okay. Pointed noted on the CMS style of approaching our project. My thinking on that is we can build the initial cut, maybe for our internal use and see how successfulo we are first. And then if it isn't the greatest, most porfessional look we can use someone out there who does this for a living.

I'm definitely on board with however you guys want to write this thing. We should put ourselves first and if we are all looking to grow from learning as a the initial product of this (and not a byproduct), then that's what we should do.

Some caveats...it will take us longer to get each piece completed if you are coding yourselves. Not a problem as far as I'm concerned, but something that should be noted. Solving problems will take longer. We dont have a UI guy, so the whole CMS idea made the most sense from a UI persepctive. Something we can think about and discuss later once we have something to make look pretty.

Re: mezzanine, is that a platform where you can write your own code and "plop" it in?

econne01 commented 11 years ago

Re: mezzanine, yeah I think that's what it is.

Re: CMS in general. Very good point, that we will want some help with UI. Hmm. I'll keep doing some more research for now.

JaBaRo commented 11 years ago

Re: UI...I think it may be something else that could be learned. perhaps one of you as the project develops could take hte lead on learning how UI shit pieces together and how to code it.

If we're really struggling, like you said, we can take our python, plop it into mezzanine, work out any quirks and hopefully work the UI from there...at least we have a fallback plan, if we want to work it on our own first.