I subscribe to the sentiment that a good way to learn development is by taking on a project. I have a few projects in mind for online directories similar to nomadlist.com.<p>So far I've been building them in Wordpress and hiring freelancers to do the bits that the plugin does not allow natively. But I cant seem to get the right kind of filters and cutomisation that I would like and have contemplated what it would take to learn to build it myself.<p>If my desired outcome was a directory site such as nomadlist.com with lots of filters, good performance, and a CMS, and assuming I was willing to take on a few months worth of learning, what would be a good learning path?<p>One option I suppose is to learn PHP and Wordpress so that I can take on the customisation of my wordpress site.<p>But I would prefer to give myself options outside of Worpdress and to learn to build a site from scratch.. Would love to hear some thoughts from the dev community.<p>The wordpress option is probably more realistic given my timeline, but I do know CSS and HTML already so maybe it is possible to learn something more advance? You tell me<p>Note: I could have asked what languages were used to build nomadlist, but I purposefully phrased the question differently because I presume that the languages he chose might night be the best/recommended languages for a newbee trying to reach the same outcome.
Hi! I made Nomad List so maybe I can tell you more. I wrote it in plain JS with only jQuery. The backend is PHP. They communicate through simple POST requests (see the Network tab when you filter). The database is SQLite for simplicity sake.<p>I'd recommend building something with a language that is easy for you to learn and that gives you freedom to make it complex or not. That's PHP for me. A big reason why I say this is because you don't want to spend too much time coding while validating your website/app idea.<p>You can always switch language/stack later.<p>I decided to go framework-less, which was a great decision early on. And I still like it although once you get more traffic and features, everything inevitably turns into spaghetti and you need to stay very knowledgable about your code to keep being able to work on it. Stuff like user sign up and login I'd love to have outsourced to a framework (for example this week login broke for no reason).<p>Also some parts of the site run on off the shelf software. The forum runs on Discourse, the chat runs on Slack etc.<p>I was obsessed with which tools to use before I made Nomad List, but then when it went viral I had to work with whatever I knew and I hear that from a lot of people. You work with what you know at that time.<p>Good luck :)
It's not language related -- you could build a simple webservice with any language and db. You could take a course on basics of building web-applications in any popular language (Ruby on rails, nodejs or php) and start out there.<p>Of course if you just want to get a directory out there, you're on the right track of maybe using wordpress with a theme, and some plugins. The language doesn't have much to do with how popular something will be.