I am in the process of planning for ultimately the creation of two, somewhat disparate websites: One is a rebuild of an OSC ecommerce site, and the other is for an art/design type site. These two formats require massively different 'themes'/grids/overall design.

Ideally each would somehow interact with each other, such as a single session for both. My programming experience is minimal, but I have time and persistance on my side.

I want something with maximal flexibility. As well as something which will not be deprecated in the near or likely future.

In my limited knowledge and experience I have come up with two contenders: Ruby's Jekyll, and Perl's Catalyst. Both seem to have the design flexibility I want for the two different formats. Both *seem* to have the ability to access the latest widgets (not that I intend to use them, but the 'art' site might need them). OK, I'll confess - the art site is for the wife, who may need to get involved in website design in the future, and I would like to keep her away from the typical CMS stuff like Wordpress (which is stifling) or Drupal (which would require enormous bloat for this project).

I do not know if Jekyll's flatfile could handle ecommerce with something like a moderately sized booksite, requiring various search modalities. I have the actual MYSQL database in a flatfile format, but am unfamiliar with the mechanics of actual payment transactions for it, though there appear to be modules for that for Jekyll. It does, however seem to have all the basics for a great design oriented site.

Now, catalyst appears to have everything. Especially Perl which I am much more familiar with than Ruby, though Ruby *appears* to be simpler for this project. Both are MVC. Catalyst apparently can handle PHP so I might be able to reuse (modified) some older OSC code. I would like to make it 'future proof', so ultimately the question comes down to how well Catalyst is currently maintained, and if there are any known projects to make it compatible with some of the node.js garbage. (Forgive my prejudice, but I have a basic dislike for everything javascript...).

The fact that Perl is 'old' appears to be a major plus. Especially in an era when we have to go to an antiques auction to get decent gardening tools. Hells bells, I even use a sledge hammer as a gardening tool. The same applies to my cyber 'garden' with its 'web'. However certain 'newfangled' stuff has its advantages. If my limited understanding of MVC is correct, I should have the ability to change databases, or even eliminate the database of a site behind the scenes. This is the kind of versatility I am looking for.

So I am freely open to suggestions here. Perl MVC sites have apparently little popularity, but apparently great power. Ruby (Perl Lite!) and Node.js have great popularity, which can actually raise the noise level high enough to mask the quality of the code modules offered.

In reply to Website Conundrum... by kel

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