I’ve spent a few bacon-laced breakfasts discussing the pros and cons of Content Management Systems (CMS) with my colleagues. Our table, surrounded by advocates of the devil, lob various justifications at each other in favor of one CMS or another. There’s no malice, only an attempt to arrive at the best solution for our latest web project. By the 7th refill of joe, we’re buzzing in agreement… just write the dang thing from scratch! It should be noted that the two greatest virtues a programmer can extol is hubris and laziness.
A client will often ask if we can use an existing CMS such as WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla to help speed up development and/or to trim development costs. After all, nobody wants to pay to re-invent the wheel, right? It’s a fair question, and one that warrants careful investigation. After all, the price tag of free often weighs heavily in the equation for prospective site owners, and if software exists that’s already 90% complete, why not start there? The short answer is a prime example of the 90/10 rule… The last 10% of the project takes 90% of the resources, and won’t get 100% of the way there..
There are some good arguments for using a canned CMS, such as: quick deployment, maturity of code, wide availability of expertise, and a broad spectrum of widgets to satisfy the post launch whims of the most eccentric site owner. At first glance, the CMS sounds too good to be true, especially after conversing with some young zealot who can promise a site up and running in less than an afternoon! So if boxed CMS’s are all that, why are there so many? As the cliché goes, if it’s too good to be true…
Following are a few items your CMS fan-boy probably overlooked:
- Out-of-the-box CMS’s tend to look canned even though most packages can be skinned with pre-rolled design templates. Note that most of the heavily re-designed instances (say Drupal) has required a team of web developers doing surgery on the core organs of the software.
- Content editing and formatting is restricted to the limitations of the CMS interface and HTML editor. Considering the greatest claim of the CMS is content editing without technical knowledge, this is invariably a drawback.
- While it’s typically easy to upgrade the major CMS’s, any customizations may require a fork in code development which will render your installation void to further upgrades. So, even though it’s open source, don’t get too creative with the code.
- Once you have established yourself with one web host that supports a particular CMS and version, it can become difficult to move your site to a new hosting environment.
- It’s not enough to simply know the language behind the CMS, the developer needs to possess an in-depth understanding of the structure of the CMS itself, a learning curve that can be much steeper than merely learning the programming language.
- With a large install base come many eyes. For both for good and bad, bugs are more readily discovered and potentially exploited when the software is ubiquitous.
- Commonly, CMS owners find themselves compromising desired functionality for conformance to the available options of the software. Would you rather realize your vision or shoe-horn your dreams into a fixed space?
- Considering SEO is a constantly moving target, it is nearly impossible for the shrink-wrapped CMS’s to keep up with the technology. Furthermore, expecting your CMS to be a magic pill for search engine rankings is simply not realistic.
- Extensibility is a big sales point of CMS’s, but many site owners are blind-sided by the tall work orders submitted by consultants to perform seemingly menial tasks.
- With many CMS’s to choose from, which one is right for you?
With all the negative vibes, you might be wondering if we ever think it makes sense to use Drupal or Joomla as the basis for a website. The answer is, “Of course!” – as thousands of satisfied web patrons have discovered. We just don’t think there is such a thing as a one-size-fits-all solution, and that the flexibility isn’t always as advertised. Moreover, most of our clients come to Mindspace for unique solutions that will make them stand out against the crowd. A cookie-cutter website is simply a no-go for the pro.
The Interactive team at Mindspace utilizes best practices from our collective years of web application development. At the beginning of a project, if we recommend a custom CMS, we typically have some explaining to do regarding the above. But usually well before the project is half over, the client realizes how, by re-using solid building blocks of time-tested code we are able to construct complete web solutions that not only delivers the vision rapidly, but also integrates current business culture and work flow.
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Tags: cms, drupal, joomla, wordpress
