Advice on how to implement an idea I have for a website

I want to create a website that allows users to leave reviews for companies in a certain niche. The home page will act as a "top 10" chart of the top companies. The rankings will depend on the users... the users determine the position of the companies in the top 10 list. Users should be able to add a new company if we don't already list it. That's the basic jist of it, I don't want to go into too much detail and complicate it, but I would like to have an IP white and black list for commenters, and be able to have users flag comments as spam for moderator review.

How would you build this website if you were creating it? I really don't want to use wordpress for this, because I can't find any plugins that do exactly what I want, and even if I did, wordpress updates too often and plugins always stop working or create problems. I don't want to build the site around some plugin and be at the mercy of wordpress or the plugin developer when it comes to keeping the site from braking. I am not completely opposed to using wp, but if there are other options (other than building the entire site from the ground up) I would like to hear about them. Maybe there is a reviews template or page builder out there already that does what I want?

I am NOT asking for anyone to build this for me, so please do not flood my pm box with generic messages telling me "yes i can do that for you". While I admit I am a novice when it comes to web design and programming, I do have some experience, and I just need a push in the right direction.

I think that you should consider to use a CMS, and wordpress is one of the best solution to build this. If you want to not depend on any plugin developer you must develop your own, also you can decide to not update wordpress in case and so setup a solid security plugin base.

The comment moderation is the easiest thing because is already part of the CMS to spam comments.

However on a website where people can subscribe you should have a secure / solid and good updated CMS, or soon you will be hacked.

Also the kind of rule you want to setup on the system are quite customized for that reasons you should develop the plugin in house.

cPanel's softaculous/fantastico has a ton of scripts for just these kinds of projects.

A friend of mine recently told me how his website (made from scratch, hosted on his home computer) one day turned into a paypal phishing site.

Creating a complex site from scratch is a ton of work just to get it going, and given the complexity of your idea it also needs stress testing done on it, etc.

And finally, you need to make it secure at least for the OWASP top 10. As the previous poster said, it will be hacked. The "it's still small, no-one would bother" attitude is terribly wrong, since hacking is already automated and bots are scraping the whole web to find vulnerable ones.

I personally write my sites using Orchard CMS as a backbone. I don't know what your programming experience is, but you will need to find a suitable CMS for your expertise as a baseline, otherwise your efforts would simply not be worth it.

Personally I would highly recommend Wordpress despite your doubts.
Im sides there's a them or plugin out there that will do what you want.

If not then you could get one built easier from bhw marketplace.

As for the updates - that's a good sign as it means security is kept right.

Use a system that never gets updated and you will have a crap site that WILL get hacked. IMHO.

davids355 said:

Use a system that never gets updated and you will have a crap site that WILL get hacked. IMHO.

Click to expand...

Now that's a fuckin guarantee there!

Thanks for the input guys. I have other sites on wordpress and won't hesitate to go that route if that's the best solution, but I haven't seen any plugins yet that do what I want. I definitely don't want to build it from the ground up. I was hoping someone might have a suggestion for a pre-existing solution. I figured there are so many reviews sites out there that there may already be a clone script, plugin, template etc similar to what I need. I am envisioning something like a top 10 product comparison website, but the rankings of the top 10 are dynamic, always changing based on user reviews (overall highest rated by users, not editor).