What would you recommend to make the site of the City Council?

Question

CMS

The city council has a poor site, they have already realized the need for its complete renovation.
We found several contractors who put up space estimates. Well, because they can, and because with tenders from government agencies, it’s like this.
As a result, I find out that the main contractor plans to create a site on a bare node, reorder from a well-known galley.
As one of the advisers to the City Council, being also an IT specialist, I understand that this can be done many times cheaper, and naturally without overstating the technical requirements.
That is, for example, because The target audience of the site is clearly limited not only by the city, and those who have the Internet, but also by those who need it at all. That is, there will obviously not be enough visitors to make a dedicated server for the node.
But still the question remains - what kind of technology stack for such a site will be needed?
It is necessary that it is not a geeky CMS, not a division made on the knee, so that it can be scaled by adding applications (for example, they want each resident to have his own office, where his requests will be visible, so that he can submit meter readings, for example), and that as a result, it was possible to order improvements without difficulties in finding a contractor due to the exotic (for example, on a meteor) or wretchedness (for example, on asp) technology.
So that there is no additional complexity with hosting and support (because the node here seems redundant to me).
I understand what you can do on the framework, but maybe there is already the right bike for such a project?
Here's another snag, so that later some "genius" would not appear, who would say, "fi, only shkolota could offer such a division - they got an awl for soap, it was necessary to stay in jumla and stay in that case."
That is, there should be something modern (like Oktouber), government grade (like any Bitrix) with the ability to scale (like frameworks) and the relative ease of finalizing functions by third-party developers (like WordPress).
What do you recommend?

Answer 1

Well, in our kingdom, all state sites are written in Drupal, oddly enough. It's as simple as tsms, it's modular and it smells like a Christmas tree based (partially) on symphony 2, that is, almost pure mvts ( read more here ). If you do not need to finish anything - ready-made cms - just set up and change the pictures. If something is finished, there are many developers of the symphony, well, in the sense they exist.
If you still roll something completely special and your own - laravel is the lowest in terms of entry threshold, and therefore not very expensive to develop.

Answer 2

"so that you can scale by adding applications and so that in the end you can order improvements without difficulties in finding a contractor due to the exotic or wretchedness of the technology."
Am I the only one who hears this as: "I need it so that in the future I can fasten it to it without changing the stack until I know what (= anything)"? Node as a tool with such requirements seems quite reasonable.
symfony, laravel, django - as alternatives, but most likely the price tag will be the same as on the node.
Do you want cms? Write the full list of planned improvements. Because CMS is too specific and narrow a tool to take it under such vague formulations. Now it seems to you that you will take Bitrix, Drupal, what else is there, put it on hosting and you are in chocolate, you saved the company a hundred. And in a couple of months your boss will come to you and say: we need to write an integration of the meter readings taken with our uber system and also create an online chat for visitors and a system for sending them notifications, well, we are also launching a mobile application, so we still a backend with api is needed - and it turns out that not a single cms is capable of this, because it is not supported out of the box, that all programmers with skills work with frameworks and the same node, and Drupal and Bitrixoids can only rearrange blocks, yes in jquery Little, that the shared hosting you have chosen provides scaling only in the Yandex maps window and you still need a dedicated server (and not only for scaling, but also to launch a daemon for the node so that your online chat can work) and that you are not at all in chocolate, although the color is similar. And in the end, you run around in soap and think whether to write an online chat that works through cron or order development from scratch.

Answer 3

=)
Bitrix

Answer 4

Because the site of the "city council" is a fairly typical product (read not "web service" with a bunch of custom bells and whistles, etc.), then in my opinion it is not advisable to use frameworks. We also discard options with self-written code, because in this case it is also redundant.
It follows that there is only one option left. CMS. Which one to choose? IMHO, you can try Drupal or Joomla or, in extreme cases, MODX Revolution. Reviews of engines for the site can be dug up on the Internet, at least you can even look here or here . They are full.
Well, or if you don’t feel sorry for the money, then order on Bitrix, in fashion, so to speak.

Answer 5

this can be done many times cheaper, and of course without overestimating the technical requirements.
there will obviously not be enough visitors to make a dedicated server

It seems to me that there is no need to be so stingy, the main thing is that they do it well, the website of the City Council is still the face of the city. In my opinion, the toolkit is not so important, documentation and documentation are important, demand that everything be documented. A well-documented product is easy to develop and maintain on any platform, and most importantly, implement it. Implementation in the City Council will not be easy for everyone.

Answer 6

You are asking the wrong question. The choice of technologies will be determined by the tasks that need to be solved. You didn't describe the problem. Describe the tasks, it will be clear what to implement.
For reasons of spherical choice of technologies: do not take anything that is written in PHP, even if it is written by some company and sold for money. Because there is a gigantic chance of running into some coders who will administer and develop. You can run into bdlockcode everywhere, but in PHP there should be especially a lot of it.