Ask YC: Building a software review website, what to use?

[tstegart]

So me and one of my friends have decided to start a software review website (iphone). We're looking to build in user reviews, search, categories, etc. It doesn't seem to make sense to us to start from scratch when there might be existing back-end software or frameworks out there to help us, but we're having trouble finding them. It seems every other day I read about a new company that's made building sites a whole lot easier, but a Google search on the subject seems to turn up a lot of SEO-ish, spammy or "make money now!" type sites that seem very shady.

So we thought we'd ask here. Have any good solutions slipped by us that people know of? What are other sites out there built on?

[aasarava]

I'd recommend a good CMS that has support for both fixed taxonomies and free tagging. Since it sounds like you'll also want to maintain some sort of a database of the products you're reviewing, Drupal sounds like it would be a good solution for you, as it'll give you both the CMS and DB creation in one package (which you can then extend further as needed.) One caveat, though, customizing Drupal well takes some time to learn. Once you get the hang of it, though, it's pretty powerful.

If you want to go simple, WordPress is a pretty good option and can be extended as needed. But you'd probably have to do a lot of work on your own to build in the product database part of things, since WP is really more of a blogging / simple CMS platform. I hear Joomla is also a good bet, and more powerful, but I haven't yet tried it myself.

[dominik → aasarava]

I'd recommend using WordPress and writing a custom plugin. You can write reviews as normal posts and just include your custom code in the review, e.g. "[software iSaber] iSaber is great because it lets me embrace my inner Jedi." The [software Saber] then gets parsed by your custom plugin, which converts it to whatever link/representation you want to use to software. For example of this in action (with books), see http://learningtheworld.eu/2007/amazon-machine-tags/

You can also use WordPress's categories and tags as navigation, and WP offers a whole host of plugins that you can use to quickly add functionality (e.g. ratings, see: http://www.lesterchan.net/wordpress/readme/wp-postratings.ht...). Since all of WP's plugins are open source, you can customize anything you use to your hearts desire.

I find the biggest advantage of WP is that it lets you focus on what's unique to your project and lets you iterate very quickly -- you get something working right away, and build up on it, with a lot of features built in from the getgo. The biggest disadvantage is that you have to work with the way WP works, which may not be appropriate for your particular application. Here, you want to do reviews and WP does a great job of dealing with blog posts, which are blocks of content just like reviews. I'd say it's a pretty good match.

If you don't like WP and want to write something from scratch, you can use Django or CakePHP or Rails, depending on your language of choice.

Best of luck!

[tstegart → dominik]

Somewhat ironically, a website created to review websites created with Django is really an example of a simplified version of what we want to create. http://www.djangosites.org/

[tstegart → aasarava]

Excellent. Thank you both for your in-depth comments. We'd thought of using blog software. I'd never gotten into WordPress much since I'd never needed more functionality besides simple blogging before now (I use Typepad). So we'll take a closer work at how well that solution will work. Thanks!

[tstegart → aasarava]

Joomla's website does a wicked good job marketing itself. If it really does what it claims.. Has anyone used it to create something close to what we're thinking?