Which frameworks for which purposes?

As someone who knew HTML (but not 5) and css (but noit 3) fairly well, but never done anything other than static pages for personal use, I am amazed at the number and variety of the new platforms and frameworks available today.

As I go through the FCC curriculum, I’m enjoying jQuery and Bootstrap, but that’s not even scratching the surface: there’s MongoDb, Angular, React, Express, nodejs, and that’s without even going beyond JavaScript. It’s amazing and exciting!

But - when I look at the websites of various social organizations, NGOs and non-profits (which is indeed where my heart lies), they usually end up with Wordpress plus a custom theme. Or Joomla, if they’re unorthodox :slight_smile:

So, is there some sort of cheatsheet or guildelines about which of these newer technologies are suitable for what purposes, in what scenarios? Such as - for functionality X use framework Y? Or a comparison of their relative strengths and weaknesses? (e.g., what does Angular do that jQuery doesn’t?)

Soon I will be setting up a website for a social project my wife is coordinating (assistance and networking for parents and guardians of autistic children). And I will probably start with Wordpress, since that way I can have a functional site within a day or two, rather than coding it all up from scratch. But, if I could make some use of the stuff that I’m learning about here, I’d love to do that, too, but I don’t know enough of them yet to make an informed choice.

No, you need to experiment with them, understand what they do and use it when needed. Some tools are more difficult to learn than others, so they are less interchangeable. But the short answer is if you’re not doing it professionally, you’re better off with a CMS like Wordpress, it takes too much time learn how to make a reasonably good website from scratch, having knowledge of CSS, programming and databases is enough to customize most CMS.

Yeah, start with WordPress. You have an instant CMS that anybody can update the site dynamically.

You can still have fun though and put what you learned here to use with WordPress. You can modify your existing WordPress theme, or even create your very own theme from scratch!

But WordPress is PHP based though which isn’t covered by FCC so you’d have to find other sources to learn PHP language.

https://codex.wordpress.org/

http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php

One of the biggest thing Angular do that jQuery doesn’t, is two-way data binding. (I guess you can roll your own 2-way data binding using jQuery/javascript). The point is it’s already made for you in Angular, ready-to-use. It’s a framework, as opposed to jquery which is a javascript library. – you still need knowledge of javascript to use either one effectively.