Why not use a CMS?

[Derleek]

So i am trying to figure out the pro's and con's of using a CMS as a developing environment. 

 

me and my partner who have recently started doing freelance web design are trying to figure out if and when we should use a CMS (the one we have in mind is Joomla!).

 

I am not convinced that we should use it in any case personally.  I feel as a decent developer that i am confident in my ability to code features, such as a mass emailing system, a membership database, a wysiwyg editor etc.

 

Here is my position on Joomla!(or any other CMS)... although i am no were NEAR familiar with it, I understand the benefits for the end user; very user friendly content management, simple permissions for membership, easy module plug-ins, it seems to be very feature rich, It still feels very confined to me.  Personally i would rather develop something that i know how it should work and understand the coding styles and everything. 

 

Now I ask, for as a starting developer i cannot answer this question, why should I develop my own code that will not doubt have holes in it (for all code typically does) when i can use a very public, free, popular CMS such as Joomla!

 

bottom line:  what do you guys feel to be the pro's and cons of using a pretty solid CMS (joomla!) for a new (not incompetent...) developer.

[proggR]

I think the pros would be the ease of updates and management wheras the cons would be a slight forfeit of customizability and creation. That's not entirely true though because most good CMS's will allow for more than enough breathing room. Modulated (probably not the right term) CMS's will allow for features to be imported to the system easy as well which will give you that ability to get creative without reinventing the wheel. And if you can find one that lets you view the source or how it gathers/passes/displays information you can always create scripts to do things you don't see already developed.

Might I direct you toward Plone? I haven't looked too much into it (and haven't looked past the name of Joomla) but I know its another open source project that looks like it has a lot of support. You'll have to take a look to see if it fits your needs though.

[jcombs_31]

My personal opinion is that a CMS is great for a blog but anything else should most likely be custom developed.  I honestly feel most clients don't really want to do their own updates and chances are when they do they'll screw something up whether using a CMS or not.  If they need the ability to update certain parts of their site then a custom solution limiting the damage factor seems to work best.  Just my $.02

[Derleek]

My personal opinion is that a CMS is great for a blog but anything else should most likely be custom developed.  I honestly feel most clients don't really want to do their own updates and chances are when they do they'll screw something up whether using a CMS or not.  If they need the ability to update certain parts of their site then a custom solution limiting the damage factor seems to work best.  Just my $.02

 

What about the whole, 'not reinventing the wheel' thing?  I mean i spent a day or two developing a promotional e-mailing system for a client that wants a very static, basic website.

 

I definitely see the point that you have to forfeit customizabilty and all but will my efforts be more fruitfull and less time consuming if i learn to code in a CMS environment? Are CMS's just for lazy developers?

 

That being said i am not a lazy developer and seek to refine my skills enough to expand beyond simple web-design.

[trq]

I definitely see CMS's having there place, especially where clients want some control. However, they don't necessarily aid in development much and in fact most CMS's Ive ever used hindered me which was why I ended up rolling my own.

 

Hey, now there's an idea. If you where to roll you own, based on a robust/extensible framework you would get all the benefits of a CMS plus the added benefit of knowing it inside out well enough to make changes where and when required.

[Liquid Fire]

I think the "big" open source CMS's like joomla and drupal have there places for hobbyist's websites and people without a technical programming/design background but if you want a professional company front facing website, those CMS are not the way to go IMO.  The biggest issue i have with them is that customizing it is harder than build a system from scratch(at least for me).  I also don't like the way CMS's manage design, it seems like it is harder to manage the design within a cms than building HTML and CSS from the ground up(but then again i am not a high end designer as i focus from programming aspect mainly).  I think and content manage system should do i thing and then is manage content.  All it should do it provide a clean and easy interface to add, delete, update, search for content on your website.

 

My biggest issue is that you loss customization possibility which is a major downside for me.

[tibberous]

Big problem with CMS's is that you end up with more crap that you would otherwise, and you generally won't know how the codebase is setup unless you invest a lot of time.

 

Personally, I like WordPress better than Joomla, but the type of site you are creating of course needs to be factored in. Even how you code matters - if you don't mind through wading through other peoples code and experimenting, you might do alright with CMS'es. My friend always hated them because he wanted to know the exact way everything worked -- I'd grep a line of text, open up the file that had it in there, and start echo'ing until I saw what something did.

[Derleek]

I also don't like the way CMS's manage design, it seems like it is harder to manage the design within a cms than building HTML and CSS from the ground up...  I think and content manage system should do i thing and then is manage content.  All it should do it provide a clean and easy interface to add, delete, update, search for content on your website.

 

My biggest issue is that you loss customization possibility which is a major downside for me.

 

I couldn't agree more.  Were i stand right now, i intend to develop my own CMS type system.  I see some potential ups and downs to this...

 

1.  My code (at this point and time) will likely not be as good as those who have coded joomla! (or any other popular CMS).  Joomla! (from what i'm told by my partner) is a very efficient CMS that can withstand very high traffic sites, while my code remains untested.  An open source project, such as Joomla!, is subject to the scrutiny of many people, so bugs are brought out quickly and fixed fast... although i trust that posting code on this site will more then make up for that.

 

2.  I feel like developing scripts that take the place of a CMS will be very beneficial to my craft.  Hell, it may even confirm that I would like to use Joomla!, but either way it will give me really good hands on experience to tackle something like a custom CMS.

 

So as it stands I am resolved to letting my partner develop Joomla! sites when a customer wants lots of control over content.  Although I will never be confident in a client's ability to not screw things up unless they prove to be competent.

 

Can you guys post some framework's that you all work in to tackle this kinda stuff?  I am new to the Web programing world so I am not familiar with any.

 

I mean do you guys exclusively develop ALL of your own scripts?  such as...

  Mass e-mailing scripts...

  Membership forms...

  Administrative priveliges...

  or really anything else?

 

Or do you all pull in pre-developed scripts and make them your own?