Re: Websites Using Perl

[aaron_baugher]

I'll chime in with the others to say to stay far away from WYSIWYG web page creators. Only use something like Dreamweaver if you have no intention whatsoever of ever viewing the page source and trying to figure out what's going on. I have yet to see one that doesn't make a mess of HTML/CSS that's brutal to decipher. The moment you have trouble getting a page to work exactly how you want it to in the editor, so you try to edit the code by hand, you'll soon be pulling out your hair.

Wordpress presents a similar problem. First of all, you say you want to use Perl, and Wordpress is PHP, so it would seem to be out. But since you mentioned it: Wordpress is a very powerful system, and there are tons of plugins to do just about everything you might want to do, plus loads of free themes. But trying to be all things to all bloggers, especially extreme newbie bloggers, necessarily has bloated it badly. Again, as long as you use it for what it provides and never, ever look under the hood, it may be fine; but the moment you decide to hack it to get some special behavior, you're digging through hundreds of PHP files just trying to figure out which one is responsible for the bit of page you're concerned with.

I'll admit I use Wordpress for my personal blog, but that's all I do with it, and it's fine for that. Even then, I sometimes feel like, as a programmer, using a packaged blog software -- especially one written in a language I loathe -- is a little like a carpenter hiring Home Depot to put in his kitchen cabinets. I really should build my own blog from scratch on Dancer or something, but that's not on top of the priority stack just yet.

Frameworks like Dancer are definitely the way to build serious sites these days, in my opinion. And yet, I think it would be a good idea for anyone getting into web programming to do some basic stuff with CGI.pm and hand-written HTML forms first, to learn the basics of what's going on between the browser and the server. Later you can move up to a framework, and fully appreciate the time savings and the better separation of code from presentation.

[bennierounder]

I would like to thank you for your reply. The website I'm building is a mixture of all different web pages. I am using wordpress and am getting used to using it quite quickly.

I copy and paste the code in the editor into vim and then do a search for the part I need to change, which I am finding useful. I'm still learning, but this is working well for me.

I am wanting to build a quote system for my website using Perl CGI.pm. The way I have decided to do this is by making a sub domain and then setting up a hyper link to that subdomain, which will be wrote in Perl. Do you think this is a good idea, I haven't done it yet but I don't think it will interfere with wordpress. The more I use Wordpress the more I am finding it amazing as a CMS. However, that being said I am going to take a look as Dancer, as advised by yourslef and others.

Thanks again for your reply and thankyou to all the rest of you guys too.