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Retrofitting a CMS?


LucasOman

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I work at a fairly large company with multiple developers. We get hundreds of thousands of visitors per day. So far, our site has been built from home-grown, loosely MVC code. We now want to empower some of the other office staff to control static portions of the site--text, images, videos, etc.

 

Some elements would be an entire page of static content set in a dynamic header/footer. In other places, we'd only want to include a small, static "pod" of content on an otherwise completely dynamic page.

 

Re-building the entire site in a stand-alone CMS like Drupal is something I'm trying to avoid. I'd love to be able to retrofit the site with a flexible CMS with a good API; ideally it would allow hooking into it with our own authentication systems (or use LDAP) and allow us to hit the API to pull bits of content as needed per page.

 

Anyone done this before? Any suggestions on a CMS to use? Do we have no choice but to re-work all of our pages in a new system?

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Scootstah,

 

That's what I'm leaning toward, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing any existing solutions; I don't want to succumb to NIH syndrome.

 

The niche of an easily retrofitted CMS with flexibility and a strong API seems like a glaring hole in the existing CMS spectrum. I could see something like that being useful to many companies.

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Well, take comfort in knowing that you are not in an entirely unique position. This happens often these days because web development expertise has been evolving quickly over the past ten or so years & sites have often been cobbled together to meet deadlines or provide various functions in an adhoc fashion. Now that they have some amazing CMS solutions available I expect we'll see less of it happening.

 

I would recommend picking of the top CMS frameworks & migrating the whole site over to it. You can use 301 redirects to mitigate the loss in any SEO value and/or bookmarks / inbound links that may have been established. Some CMS's also permit for aliases so you can permanently make definite that elderly urls will keep working.

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