Re^2: Website Conundrum...

[kel]

I feel like the pinball player in the Who song. Except I'm even missing a sense of smell.

Or, in this case, *real* functioning templates like I have for a bunch of PHP sites. The problem with them of course is their *inflexibility*. OSCommerce is pretty well hardcoded in many areas that i would really want to change. Plus the fact that simply adding a page or a box can be a night's work.

Basically what I am looking for is a swiss army cyber-knife. I am new to MVC and seeing a certain unexpected complexity to Rails, figured that if I am going to need to learn web frameworks (or whatever the more comprehensive term is) - that I would better learn the most (apparently) powerful - and then downgrade to the simpler. In short, I feel I need to learn something as complex as Catalyst (or even Mojo if it can equal its capabilities) - to be able to better use Jekyll ( for simpler sites).

I have taken a contrary approach to learning OO - for which I have long had a mental block. I am learning Ruby OO, which I find intuitive - and that is suddenly making sense out of Perl's OO format.Perhaps even some day Java might make sense.

Tke key aspect here is versatility, rather than simplicity. For simplicity I dont need to bother with MVC. I could just crank out a Drupal template, and toss some pics and text on it.

I have the Catalyst book, so that may give me a leg up on what is traditionally poor documentation that has hobbled the Perl community. So much effort writing docs (Perl has the most extensive doc parsing of all) - but so little effort to make them comprehensible.

If I can make a community website from the obfuscatory jibberish that consitutes the Drupal documentation, then I am not intimidated by Perl jibberish. At least its familiar to me.

Community support is important. Vitally important actually in building *any* site. There are always snags not counted in google. So the question comes down to which is more 'lively' - Mojo or Catalyst these days. And if i must deal with Java/JS/Node - which platform would be the most flexible with it?

Dancer is probably a good choice also, but the community seems smaller, and I do get the feeling that if I learn Catalyst, them Dancer development should be more easy to deal with. Of course I could be wrong!!!