Simon Willison’s Weblog

If you were to build homeaway or vrbo from scratch, which software would you use?

14th January 2012

My answer to If you were to build homeaway or vrbo from scratch, which software would you use? on Quora

HomeAway and VRBO are user-submitted content marketplaces, not traditional content management systems—using a CMS such as Drupal or Joomla would in my opinion be a mistake, as you’ll find yourself spending most of your time writing custom code. The benefits of a CMS will mostly be irrelevant for this application, and you’ll spend a bunch of time coding around their limitations and disabling default functionality that doesn’t fit your purposes.

You would be much better off with a framework such as Rails or Django which helps you quickly solve the common problems (such as user registration, templating, database connection management etc) but won’t get in your way at all when it comes to writing custom code.