Hi everyone,

I am planning on writing a small community portal solution for a small user group. Apart from a few standard functions (extendable user profiles, avatars, chatroom, discussion forum, wiki, role-based user management, internationalization, security, authentication, fully skinnable UI so that all modules look alike after editing a central design template...) I also want to add one custom specific module providing a custom specific function.
So we are talking about a normal web portal solution with lots of standard functionality and little custom functions.

So my idea was this:
1. Find a suitable, existing web portal / web framework / CMS
2. Install all standard modules I need
3. Create a central design template
4. Write my custom module
5. Be happy with a finished portal with a minimum of custom code writing (= fast).
6. Extend it whereever I need to

Here's my question:
What should I use? Zope/Plone or some PHP-portal/CMS/framework or something else?

Even though I am a Java developer, I know doing the above thing J2EE-style would take too long.
I don't know PHP nor Python but I assume this project is worth learning a new language.

But which one? What do you suggest? Why?
If you suggest PHP: which framework / portal / CMS is suitable for my project?

I know this is a XOOPS forum so I assume the standard answer will be: use XOOPS (PHP). But why? What makes XOOPS my first choice? What alternatives should I consider?

Thanks

scrut

Well you should use one of the free projects forsure. Why reinvent the wheel? I use a bunch of different projects myself. I guess its based on your server win/lin. Dotnetnuke, Xoops, MODx & Cocoon ect. ect... what ever you are the fastest with would be best.

I can crank out some pretty nice sites with all kinds of different stuff. I am sure you can as well. Stick with what you know.

Please let me preface this with I have a limited experience with Plone... However, I did build several sites using Zope (without Plone) and several with Plone included. When a security patch was released for Zope, it often broke my Plone installation. I had to search the Zope error logs and use the history rollback feature several times. Eventually everything worked out but upgrading was a hassle.

In contrast, XOOPS has been fairly easy to upgrade - the core that is... I had to set up several test environments to test it with all of the 3rd party modules I had installed.

Also let me say, I'm looking very seriously at Joomla. It has in production several features that the core of XOOPS has in their new development plans.

All in All, your guess is right, I'd say stick with a PHP/MySQL based solution. XOOPS is my choice because it's what I know best.

Let us know what you choose, I'm interested to know...

I hope that helped..