Is making your own content mangement system a good idea?

[Cain]

Is making your own content mangement system a good idea?

[Jerry Stuckle]

Cain wrote:

Is making your own content mangement system a good idea?

Depends on how fancy you need it to be and how much time you're willing
to spend on it.

--
=============== ===
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
js*******@attgl obal.net
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[no]

On Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:28:46 GMT, "Cain" <Ca*******@243K 4ooko342o.net>
wrote:

>Is making your own content mangement system a good idea?

Another thing to ask yourself is - if you use a pre-written CMS will
you be breaching the author's license if you use it for whatever
purpose you want it for?

Chris R.

[Cain]

Another thing to ask yourself is - if you use a pre-written CMS will
you be breaching the author's license if you use it for whatever
purpose you want it for?

What do you mean?

[Gordon Burditt]

>Another thing to ask yourself is - if you use a pre-written CMS will

>you be breaching the author's license if you use it for whatever
purpose you want it for?

What do you mean?

If the license says the CMS may not be used to maintain an e-commerce
site, and you intend using it for an e-commerce site, that's a problem.

If the license says that the users of their CMS may not send or have
ever sent unsolicited commercial email and you have, that's a problem.

If the license says that you may not modify it, and it puts ads for
the author's web site on every page, and you consider that objectionable,
that's a problem.

[Noodle]

Cain wrote:

Is making your own content mangement system a good idea?

If you love a coding and a challenge, do it! Its a lot of work, but you
should be able to knock something together in a week. I've been working
on my own for a few months (re-written it about four times), and it's
been a great learning experience as well as a chance to expand my PHP
skills.

Otherwise, if you couldn't be bothered spending the time coding. Just
use one of the packages out there. They only take 10 minutes to setup,
and have a lot of features..well a lot more than I wrote into mine.

[mootmail-googlegroups]

Gordon Burditt wrote:

Another thing to ask yourself is - if you use a pre-written CMS will
you be breaching the author's license if you use it for whatever
purpose you want it for?

What do you mean?

If the license says the CMS may not be used to maintain an e-commerce
site, and you intend using it for an e-commerce site, that's a problem.

If the license says that the users of their CMS may not send or have
ever sent unsolicited commercial email and you have, that's a problem.

If the license says that you may not modify it, and it puts ads for
the author's web site on every page, and you consider that objectionable,
that's a problem.

After you've confirmed that you won't clash with the license, then I
have to ask: why reinvent the wheel?

There are plenty of choices out there and unless you need a highly
specialized and customized solution, (and this isn't just meant to be a
learning experience), then just find whatever is closest to what you
want and use that. Tons of people have been working a lot longer and a
lot harder on CMS's than you, and anything you make from scratch will
be a long way off for a long time from anything currently available.

If you don't find anything that exactly suits your needs, then look for
something which is open-source and will allow you to modify the source.
If you can find a CMS that is mostly there, and only have to add one
or two 'modules' of your own design, then it will still take a lot less
time than building the whole thing from the ground up.

[pittendrigh]

Cain wrote:

Is making your own content mangement system a good idea?

I made http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/1463.html
There's a lot it doesn't do, but a lot it does do.

This one has no concept of templates nor an editor of any kind.
Instead you make a hierarchical file system, composed of
descriptive directory names and descriptive file names,
like "Nice_Looking_F ish.jpg" instead of "dscn1234.j pg"
deals with a list of "known files" to know what to make
links for and what to skip......html fragments, complete html,
text, images, image captions.

So, I just copy new files to the right locations, press the reload
button and voila.

It does need a plugable, module-based page rendering engine.
Someday.
Was it a good idea? I can manage hundreds of image-and-text-based
how-to-do-it boat building pages easier than I could with any
other system I looked at.

[Karl Groves]

"Cain" <Ca*******@243K 4ooko342o.netwr ote in news:2SuRg.4012 2$wg.6011
@fe1.news.bluey onder.co.uk:

Is making your own content mangement system a good idea?

It depends on what you need.
Personally, I find a lot of the CMSes out there to be bloated turds, trying
to be everything to everyone. They suffer from Project Entropy and most
are so married to their template system that you have to do as much work to
make it yours as you would to make a CMS of your own.

At the same time, if you find an OS CMS that fits your needs, then by all
means use it. As others have said, it makes no sense to reinvent the wheel.

--
Karl Groves
www.karlcore.com

[Adam]

On Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:28:46 GMT, Cain wrote:

>Is making your own content mangement system a good idea?

Depends! ... on how good your programming skills are ;-)

If you can write truly modular code that you can re-use in other
applications, then maybe, yes - as you wouldn't be re-inventing the
wheel every time.

It's a trade off between making something highly customised for one
particular client (which would then need a lot of modifying for other
clients) and a "catch-all" design that may be OK for a fair few
clients but is a bit of a strait-jacket - where you might end up
adding sorely missed features anyway.

I used to write my own, but found that as my coding skills got better,
I ended up pretty well starting from scratch each time - as looking at
my (not very modular) old code always gave me the shivers!

The last half a dozen or so CMS type projects, I've managed to
successfully shoe-horn into Joomla - which I quite like as it has good
CSS template support and has plenty of decent add-ons.

It also depends on the actual *content* of your site. If it's a fairly
"newsy", text-orientated site then a "blog" style CMS like Joomla or
Geeklog would be fine (there a plenty to choose from). If the content
doesn't fit into an obvious structure - or is very "visual'" in nature
you might need something else.

If your coding skills are reasonable, it's perfectly possible to write
your own modules/components for Joomla to suit your needs. The real
advantage of a good CMS I found was that the various modules could be
installed, enabled or disabled very easily from a good admin back-end.

Adam.