what is the best technologies to create a crowd funding service?

[Onrea]

e're going to invest on a crowd funding website in our country. Currently, there's not any native service.

• Which one is better: programming an application from scratch or creating a plugin for current CMS's such as Wordpress, Joomla, etc?
  Which programming language is the best to make it from scratch for these days?
  Is there any CMS or addon-for-a-cms to found this service?
  

[camerongray]

Well, it totally depends on what you are doing.  A crowd funding site is very custom so I would be inclined to write that from scratch rather than using a CMS.  A CMS would be better if you had a site with lots of pages and just a few interactive elements.

Programming language really comes down to what you know and are comforable with.  PHP is fairly easy to get started in but it is also very easy to write very bad PHP code. If you are using PHP I would strongly recommend you use a framework such as Codeigniter or Laravel over starting from nothing.

Alternatively languages like Python and Ruby can be used with very good frameworks (Django for Python and Ruby on Rails for Ruby).  These frameworks do a lot of stuff for you and perform extremely well although the learning curve is potentially steeper when compared to the likes of PHP.

[Onrea]

I was on an IRC and people suggested node.js for modern front end experiences, with this working example:  http://community.nodebb.org, a forum-creator based on node.js and javascript.
we are not programmer. we just want to invest: we will hire/employ geeks to code it for us. we want to know exactly which language, to know which programmer!

[camerongray]

Node.js is okay but not as widely used as the likes of Python/PHP.  In the end the language isn't that important.

Be very careful with a lot of those freelancer websites for hiring developers as a lot of the people on there are not good developers at all, they can knock a site out quickly and cheaply but they can be extremely badly built which can cause security issues and high costs down the line.

On that subject I would then potentially lean towards looking for freelancers to built it in something such as Python with the Django framework or with Ruby on Rails.  My logic behind this is that it is extremely easy to learn PHP but much more difficult to be good at it - The danger here is that you hire a freelancer who knows how to write stuff in PHP but does not understand how to build a good quality application so you can end up with a mess.

A framework like the two I just mentioned will force the developer into a very predefined structure which makes it a lot harder to mess up and means that down the line if you were to hire another developer, as long as they know the framework they will be able to understand how it is all laid out.  On the other hand, a PHP developer could easily write absolutely everything from scratch in their own custom way which can then become an absolute nightmare for another developer to come in and fix.

[Geek-9pm]

e're going to invest on a crowd funding website in our country. Currently, there's not any native service.

• Which one is better: programming an application from scratch or creating a plugin for current CMS's such as Wordpress, Joomla, etc?
  Which programming language is the best to make it from scratch for these days?
  Is there any CMS or addon-for-a-cms to found this service?
  

The theme 'crowd funding' is not unique or have issues that have never been  solved. It is not rocket science.
Do not do it from scratch.
Millions of websites a re built on high-level tools, like joomla.
http://www.joomla.org/
Same is true of WordPress.

[camerongray]

The theme 'crowd funding' is not unique or have issues that have never been  solved. It is not rocket science.
Do not do it from scratch.
Millions of websites a re built on high-level tools, like joomla.
http://www.joomla.org/
Same is true of WordPress.

So now you tell the OP to use a premade CMS which is not the most appropriate platform for their application and introduce a load of confusion...

CMSs have modules for lots of things but crowdfunding is an extremely custom application, there is no real benefit to building this on top of an existing CMS other than using a tool for a purpose other than it was intended.  A crowdfunding site is not a normal website with pages of information, it is a completely custom web application.  Looking around online I can't find a single decent crowdfunding module for CMSs.  You would end up with the majority of your site sitting in a module and a fraction of the CMS actually being used.

I build a lot of sites - The ones that have pages of information with maybe a few interactive elements such as those for small businesses are built using CMSs but a lot of them are completely custom web applications, building this on a CMS is not the right approach.  Look at all the other popular crowdfunding sites, they are not built on top of off-the-shelf CMSs.

Geek - Look into web development frameworks like Django or Ruby on Rails - They are designed to let you build web applications rapidly and do a lot of stuff for the developer, yet they do not force them to have to develop plugins for some sort of premade CMS.  This is how modern web applications are built.