CakePHP, CodeIgniter or Rails for Tumblr multi-user cloning?

Question

I'm going to start creating a tumblr clone that handles multiple users (so off-the-shelf clones like Gelato won't clip it), and I'm not sure which structure I would like to build.

Now I am going to create a prototype. Something I can get a dozen friends to test the concept and grow, maybe a couple of hundred users to prove the market, so I'm not worried about the long-term scale. My biggest problem right now is rapid deployment. I would like to get from zero to register as soon as possible, with as little setting as possible within the scope of the selection.

I have experience with PHP, but not with Ruby. However, I don’t think the learning curve will be too steep, so I don’t exclude the rails. I just want the framework to be the most suitable for the system, such as the multi-user clown tumblr, so that I can create it with minimal hassle and as quickly as possible.

If someone has experience working with a similar project or with these structures and can offer an insightful perspective, I would be very grateful.

Thanks for taking the time to read.

Cheers, ~ Jordan Feldstein

Answer 1

I have been developing in PHP since 2000 and still have a bunch of PHP systems in production (using both CodeIgniter and CakePHP).

I found that Rails is incredibly more efficient to develop ... easily 50% better performance, depending on use case. Faster and better. Easy choice for me.

Answer 2

Definitely Rails. It would be much faster to develop such a project in Rails.

As I understand it, PHP is brighter than Rails in ORM. Rails routing is much better than any PHP infrastructure.

Answer 3

+1 for Rails.

I can not talk about Codeigniter. My general understanding echoes the above statements. Lightweight and not fully object oriented.

I have developed at CakePHP since January 2006, trying to get Rails deployed to my own server, and fail. Rails was not easy to deploy then ... at least not for me. Cake was the best alternative at the time, and still a lot.

Cake is a very competent structure. However, I agree with the claims that it is far behind Rails in many ways. Some features are not well designed, less integrated, or simplified in comparison.

A few months ago, I spent a couple of days migrating one of my Cake applications to Rails2. Like an exercise. The learning curve was very shallow for someone like me (with a decent understanding of the concepts that Cake and Rails are built on). Recently, we started porting one of our applications to work in Rails (also from Cake), because we found that support for a lot of important things for us is available in Rails or Ruby, but not available or completed in Cake and PHP.

If you are not sure about switching to Ruby, you can look at lithium (formerly CakePHP v3). This is only PHP 5.3 and still a good way from 1.0, but the community is active, and usually it looks like Cake could be if it was launched today, and not 2005.

Answer 4

CodeIgniter is very lightweight, which is likely to the detriment of this project if you want as little code as possible.

Answer 5

CakePHP is almost an attempt to port Rails to PHP, so the choice between these two structures will depend on other factors.

One factor will be whether you want to learn Ruby or not. I did this and I think that it is superior to PHP, but more practical problems make me experiment more with it (you need to use PHP at work).

Another problem will be placement. I use Dreamhost, and the board is the same for PHP and Rails. However, my friend just got a GoDaddy hosting account, and he actually has to pay a higher monthly hosting fee with Passenger support.