Should a CMS be used for a photographer portfolio web site?

Question

My friend photographer asked me to develop a portfolio web site, and I'm wondering if a content management system (CMS) should be used for this purpose? The website contains a minimum of dynamic stuff, mostly just photo galleries and a "Contacts" page. I have some experience in development using PHP frameworks (Yii and CI), so it makes me wonder what is the most effortless and effective way to do develop this: - a) use some kind of CMS (will take time and effort to learn and customize CMS to fit my needs) - b) develop a website from scratch using MVC framework (need to write more code, but more control over the development flow) Any tips from people experienced in developing those kind of websites is much appriciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

In this case something as simple as Wordpress might not hurt to take a look at. Especially if you are doing something simple like uploading images. You can create this functionality from scratch using a framework, and you will have way more control of it, but it comes at the cost of building the front-end views (how it will be displayed), as well as some kind of CMS admin area interface for your client to upload their images to. Not to mention you will have to have some kind of authentication system in place to allow your use to login so they can use the admin area.

Most time consuming - Building CMS from scratch or with Framework

Less time consuming - Using CMS tool like Wordpress

Least time consuming - Setting them up with a SquareSpace, or similar site building service and giving them access to it

It depends on whether your interest and desire is to explore programming and build things with code, or to get their site up and running as painlessly as possible.

Hope that helps!