Re-inventing the wheel?

Posted by André Figueira on 08th August 2011

Content Management Systems (CMS): Reinvent the wheel or not? Yes, you should! One of the main reasons is because the existing CMS out there were all tailored to a wide audience, not your clients' requirements. Drupal, Joomla, Expression Engine, etc... these are all well thought out and well built, but one of the key things that make these CMS the main players are because they have countless plugins, they get the job done, and they are relatively easy to learn how to use. But the big problem is that these big-player CMS are far too bloated.

Constant updates to make the CMS better and better by increasing the features only increases the load on the server, and this is not good because the majority of people will not be using a lot of these features.

The additional features which are usually packed onto these CMS are just overkill, and the average client doesn't want all of them. Web design agencies needs to cater to that and trim a whole bunch of features from the CMS, which will cost time and money.

This results in more time being spent on a system which was not built in-house, and these are hours which are seldom re-usable. This is because not every client will want the same thing, some will want a feature another didn't, so more work is required chopping out and adding in. The main point is, if you code your own CMS, not only will it make you seem more professional for having your own in-house system, but It will be easier for your developers to cater to your clients every desire. They will be able to modify that CMS so easily that you will have wished you did this from the very start. 

Because you have an in-house system now, you can easily add your own features and make sure your system isn't bloated without worrying about breaking it.

You will know your system inside out, so any bugs that crop up you will likely be able to fix them in no time! What I say here is from experience, from the countless CMS I have worked with the one I am most happy with is the in-house system I built for MintTwist. It's speedy, easy to manage and extremely easy to modify, because it's in our own framework so we don't have to learn someone else's framework or adopt their coding standards!

So to summarise; sure, using a CMS other than your own will save some time on a few projects, but to truly make the most of your time go for an in-house CMS for the following excellent reasons: you can make it faster, you can edit the core framework, you can easily modify it, the code of the CMS will adhere with your company's coding standards, you can easily train new employees on how to use your framework, and it will be easy to trim to your clients requirements.