Server side preference when buying a site (PHP, Wordpress, .NET etc.)

[starshape]

Hi everyone,

When you are buying a site, what would you look for when it comes to server side technologies? Do you only look for LAMP based sites or are you willing to look at ASP.NET too. Is there a particular CMS that would sway your decision?

I'm asking as I'm looking at developing several domains as well as offering web development services. I'm a .NET CMS developer by day and would happily build all my sites in .NET, but most sites seem to be LAMP based with a strong bias towards Wordpress as a CMS.

I'm now at the point where I have to decide what to use to develop my own sites, PHP/Wordpress/CMS or .NET MVC framework. I can see both plus and minus points for me on both paths.

The development jobs market where I live is quite heavily dominated by Microsoft technologies, but I'd like to hear the opinions of people out there in the wider world before I make my choice.

Any help with this would be appreciated.

Thanks

Thomas

 

[tifosi]

It's one of those 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' questions!

I'm the reverse of you in that I'm a PHP developer by day. I have developed for asp in the past and remember the arguments with the development director over the 'security' issues with php. That was 5yrs ago though and PHP has moved on a long way since then - more in the java direction that anything - with php5.3 being really the maturity point for its OOP abilities.

PHP is a 'loosely coded' language. It's up to the developer to write the code. It's an easy to learn language and that can be it's downpoint in that it's also easy to write crap in any language.

I've also written plugins for wordpress (and have more in the pipeline). I detest Wordpress from a purist point of view - it's an unholy mess of archaic spaghetti code with procedural and class based code mixed in together. It loads everything bar the kitchen sink at the start. Admittedly it has a lot of functionality - most of which most users (or developers) never use - and a strong following because, well it's free. It's NOT an MVC. There are many real PHP OOP MVC frameworks out there to rival any .Net one. Examples include Kohana, Yii, Cake & Symphony.

As for the job market php is increasingly being used in the enterprise market alongside MySQL especially for ecommerce & large social networking applications. Good enough for Facebook! LAMP with strong OOP php abilities will be a growth market in the next few years.

LAMP hosting also has the edge - not arguing plus/minus in functionality - in that it's mpre widely available in all it's flavours and runs all the popular databases - it's 'partnership' with MySQL though is the real strength. LAMP hosting pro-rata tends to be cheaper. The rise of the VPS as well as a hosting entity is also driven by Unix/Linux based layers.

If I had the choice again which direction to go I'd go PHP/MySQL without question. And tag on to that jQuery.

 

[monaghan]

I prefer PHP, but run both LAMP and Windows servers. A modern Windows server will give you both the traditional ASP/ASP.Net route and also PHP with MySQL if desired. If you don't need a control panel, then Linux is definitely the cheaper option as there's no license fees involved, if you can make do with the free MSSQL version it balances out a little more when comparing vanilla Windows with a cPanel server.

My preference is always Unix based for a server platform, but then again I started "Proper Computing" with VMS & Unix, those who've only ever run Microsoft would probably not want to touch anything Unix based.

Bottom line is your personal preference for your development environment. Also, if you are really keen you could look at the mono project which will allow you to run .Net on a non-Microsoft platform! Check whether you can use your work tool set for personal development though, the non-free Visual Studio is not a cheap solution.

Regardless of what those who take sides say, within reason you can do the same on PHP as you can on .Net it is just different ways of doing things and as Tifosi says you can write crap in any language

 

[murph]

Personally php/mysql essential!

 

[accelerator]

I switched from ASP.net to PHP for my sites, and don't regret it. PHP is much easier to code, less technical headaches, way more ready to go scripts, way more help online, cheaper hosting ... I'm far more productive with PHP.

Rgds

 

[Blossom]

If there's a chance you may sell at some point in the future, PHP/WordPress is generally a lot more attractive to buyers.