Which framework/CMS to be used

i am 开发者_开发知识库a hobby programmer with very little experience in web programming, i devote an average f 20-30 hours a week, but with summers coming i have some free time to experiment and learn. could anyone please tell me, whether a framework like (Kohana/cakePHP/CI) should be used or directly a CMS tool like drupal/joomla should be used to make a website something like stackoverflow, on a smaller scale though.

Thanks for your help.

It depends on what you want to learn. Depends on your goal.

Is it webdevelopment you wish to learn? CSS? Webdesign? Programming? Building sites?

If your goal is the site itself, I would suggest to start high up in the stack: use a ready-to-go CMS, such as Drupal, that gets you going fast. And that offers a (production ready) result in a few hours. Your downside will be freedom: sure Drupal can do a lot, so can Wordpress. But unless you move down in the stack (develop addons and such) you will have to do with what you are offered: ready made components that work according to the authors wish. Possibly not your wish.

If your goal is to learn webdevelopment in a more general way, you should start lower down in the stack. Ruby on Rails or Django are probably the best options. Simply because of their vast resource on newbie documentation. You will learn programming along the way there too. Within a few days you will have built a site according to your exact wishes (obviously, your milage may vary, depending on the wishes:)).

If your goal is development of software, Python and Ruby are most probably a good start too: both are cross-platform, have good newbie resources and offer great documentation. Both are really well (opinions may differ on this) abstraction and object orientation. They will form you into a good programmer, simply by their nature.

There's a Stackoverflow clone called Qwench that is free. (search stackoverflow for open source stackoverflow clones)

and one built on drupal http://drupal.org/project/arrayshift

Wordpress can act very much like Stackoverflow with a proper template. See here: http://p2theme.com/ (demo here: http://p2demo.wordpress.com/). Actually you can than start editing the theme (.php files) and make it behave more and more like Stackoverflow (with reputation system etc. which should be easy to implement). This way you won't be reinventing the wheel and have a good headstart.

I personally use CodeIgniter and love it. I would recommend it to any novice looking to further their knowledge of object oriented programming, and any veterans looking to get their projects off the ground quicker. I am not going to go into great detail here, because I know Kohana and CakePHP are similar, and its mostly opinion. CI does have great documentation though.

I think learning the most common CMS is going to be hugely beneficial to you, tons of sites and companies use WP/Drupal/Joomla/Etc and it really can't hurt to understand them. These projects are very large, so you don't necessarily need to know their internal operations 100%, but you should know enough to be able to install, customize and get a site up and running fairly quickly.

Everyone has their favorites, but I invite you to try them all and see what moves you. It will NEVER hurt to learn something and not use it, especially with some extra time.

There are times to use a packaged CMS and hopefully be able to theme/customize it to what you need quickly...then there are times you will want to code a special case by hand using a framework.

Just understand the depth of the project you want to undertake, because starting from scratch is fun and rewarding, but once you get neck deep in code and get stuck its easy to lose motivation all together.

I would suggest learning the basics of HTML before diving in to using a content management system. The importance of understanding the basic building blocks of websites can't be overstated.

There are loads of resources online to learning about HTML - once you've got some experience with that, you can look at CSS, Javascript, and server-side scripting languages. Knowing the basics will help with using any content management system.

Joomla / Drupal are a good place to start with content management systems, as is Wordpress, but you'd be much better off learning how it works underneath (at least to the most basic extent) before diving in to anything else.

If you're already a programmer you won't find it too hard, but it's definitely worth doing.