Building a question answer site using CMS

I want to develop a question answer site like this one, for students to ask schools and career planning related questions. I was planning to use Joomla as CMS but am not sure whether such site could work fine wih a CMS. I have little experience in website development and it will be a learning experience for me.Can such a site work fine by using a CMS or i have to make it in pure PHP programming.(in that case how would i go about developing administrative tools ) Please guide me in planning the development.thanx

Well i dont really think a CMS is the right choice here. Except for maybe a few static apges like FAQ's, TOS, stuff like that the site is going to be pure data interaction and stats. You could do it ina CMS but i think it would be more of a headache than its worth. Instead i would recommend using a RAD oriented development framework like Cake or Symfony. Unless you have specific needs you can get most of the admin done with the generated admin iterfaces. You might also be able to use much of the generated CRUD for the user areas, but not doubt some customization if not something completely different will be needed here.

If youre not stuck on `php` Ruby on Rails (`ruby`) and Django (`python`) suport much of the same feature set on their respective languages.

That said all these are going to have a high learning curve if you dont come from some kind of programming background (maybe even if you do)... Then again so is a CMS and at least the frameworks ive mentioned are going to automate a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

With Joomla, it would have to be a custom component that handles the questions/answers, custom user scripts that handle reputation, moderation, etc (if you want that kind of thing).

I think the only big benefits Joomla will provide are templating, registration, localisation and database management, most of the other stuff you will have to do yourself anyway.

One easy, while costly, option would be to license the [software behind Stackoverflow](

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).

[ArrayShift](

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) seems to be a free and open-source clone of the this platform, built on top of Drupal:

> A question/answer site built to emulate the core functionality of the StackOverflow.com site and the StackExchange platform. Originally built as a fantasy site for Lullabot's Do It With Drupal conference in December 2009, the installation profile is capable of bootstrapping and configuring the initial site.
>
>It currently implements a reasonable subset of the site's functionality, but is incomplete and far from bug-free. It has rough edges that need to be smoothed out and functionality that needs to be finished in other contrib modules before this package could be considered a full feature-clone of Stack Overflow, or before it could be considered ready-for-use by site builders who do not already know Drupal well. A TODO.txt will be coming shortly.

you can use Joomla but you'll need a forum plugin like [Kunena][1]


[1]:

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There's a Stackoverflow clone called Qwench that is free.

you can use the extensions lknAnswers,SimAnswers,jAnswers Factory,C-Logic Answers,GQA

This is an old post but Lampcms looks good too.

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