Hi everyone,

 

This is my first post to the forums, and I'm hoping someone can shed some more light on how CMS are developed/deployed commercially. I have been building static sites for a number of years, but always avoided any kind of CMS other than recommending Adobe Contribute to my clients. In practice this does not work, as Contribute is not a true CMS, but a software application with which to edit websites. Being a one-man-band I always assumed database driven sites for commercial websites were created from scratch by big agencies charging high fees. Is this true? Or do the majority of CMS based sites start from one of the systems I see mentioned so often - ie Joomla, Expression Engine etc. ? I would be grateful for any feedback, as I don't have the skills to create my own CMS, but I realise I badly need to offer this solution to my clients at reasonable cost.

 

Thanks for any replies.

There's no point reinventing the wheel. I would choose the CMS which is best for the client's needs. They may only want something simple and easy for a complete beginner, or they maybe a one-man band who's quite advanced, or it maybe loads of people accessing it. They may or may not want a photo gallery, etc, etc...

 

There's no big secret. Using a pre-made CMS means it saves you time, saves the client money and you both get reassurance that the CMS has been used and tested by loads of developers so it should be pretty stable.

 

Custom made CMS are only for exceptional or highly tailormade for big clients. But then again, there's so many plugins and add-ons for CMS's that you can get an original setup with out custom coding.

 

When a client wants content management I always ask how often they plan on updating it. If it's every day/week then fine I'll use a CMS but it's usually something they've heard of but not really thought about. They may update once a year and the time it takes for me to show them and then reteach them in a year for minor changes, they might as well pay for me to update it - it would be quicker and much easier (therefore cheaper for them in the long run).

 

As for what one, I've used Wordpress for a few blogs and a client's site. Obviously good for blogs but it ain't great if the client wants control of everything (nav, footers, etc), next time I'd steer towards a more complete CMS than hacking a blog system.

There's no point reinventing the wheel. I would choose the CMS which is best for the client's needs. They may only want something simple and easy for a complete beginner, or they maybe a one-man band who's quite advanced, or it maybe loads of people accessing it. They may or may not want a photo gallery, etc, etc...

 

There's no big secret. Using a pre-made CMS means it saves you time, saves the client money and you both get reassurance that the CMS has been used and tested by loads of developers so it should be pretty stable.

 

Custom made CMS are only for exceptional or highly tailormade for big clients. But then again, there's so many plugins and add-ons for CMS's that you can get an original setup with out custom coding.

 

When a client wants content management I always ask how often they plan on updating it. If it's every day/week then fine I'll use a CMS but it's usually something they've heard of but not really thought about. They may update once a year and the time it takes for me to show them and then reteach them in a year for minor changes, they might as well pay for me to update it - it would be quicker and much easier (therefore cheaper for them in the long run).

 

As for what one, I've used Wordpress for a few blogs and a client's site. Obviously good for blogs but it ain't great if the client wants control of everything (nav, footers, etc), next time I'd steer towards a more complete CMS than hacking a blog system.

 

cheers fruit and veg you've consolidated my initial thoughts in an are i need to look into more..

 

^ just what fruit n veg said

 

There are a lot of CMS's available to choose from, each has it's own strengths and weaknesses, and it's really a case of finding the right one for the job in hand.

 

Of course there are Opensource/free CMS's and commercial ones. It's easy to be tempted with "free" for every job but always weigh the options up for what's best for the client and their site.

Thanks for all your quick and valuable replies, especially Fruit and Veg for taking the time.

 

Cheers.

There's no point reinventing the wheel.

 

I'm probably going to start world war three here but i disagree!

 

There are indeed many CMS's out there, and some of them offer amazing functionality for free. The problem is, the whole point of a CMS is to make it easy for a solicitor, florist or artist to update their website without any intervention or training from a website developer.

 

While I have found many useful CMS's, I have found very few that I would happily pass on to my technophobe Mother to use!

 

The problem I find with most CMS systems is that they are just a cut down, slightly harder to use version of Dreamweaver. And while they offer huge functionality, non-web development businesses won't be interested, all they will want to do is add another image to their gallery or change a phone number or add their latest press release or news article.

 

There are of course exceptions. When we started our web development and marketing company we were looking at plune, a popular open source CMS. But after it took me about a day to work out how the hell to use it it suddenly dawned on me our clients would hate it. So we built our own. It's a small system and it doesn't do much but it does 99% of the things our clients will want to do and makes it a hell of a lot easier to do it.

 

So, long story short, if you want a CMS that even the worst technophobes could use without having a panic attack then building a CMS for that purpose isn't reinventing the wheel, it's improving the wheel and adding more grip because you're making it from scratch with your clients needs in mind, something the original wheel makers won't have done.

 

Well, that's my two cents anyway!

^^I agree

 

If you are able to do it at home - then its always best

 

Once you have built a few different easy to use CMS yourself, it becomes easy to re-use/ adapt

 

Definately worth the time, build yourself up a whole new set of skills

 

(I would suggest anyone wanting to do this find out all about relational database structure first though)

The problem I find with most CMS systems is that they are just a cut down, slightly harder to use version of Dreamweaver.

 

Right... because DW is so easy to use.

 

I think what the OP needs to do is play. Find demos of popular CMSs, or even download some of the free / open source ones and have a mess around. See what they're like to use. You'll soon find one that will be appropriate, whatever you need it for. Just remember that expensive doesn't always mean good, and free doesn't always mean bad.

Or do the majority of CMS based sites start from one of the systems I see mentioned so often - ie Joomla, Expression Engine etc. ?

 

Just to highlight another point by OP!

 

In fact, it goes even deeper than that, one of the hardest things to implement in a CMS is the What You See Is What You Get feature, for example a Microsoft Word type editor in the CMS that allows you to change font size, colours, insert images etc.

 

Out of all of the web based CMS sytems I've seen I'd say over three quaters of them use something called TinyMCE. It's a very clever javascript application that converts a HTML text area into a full fledged CMS within itself.

 

I've used it in my CMS too!

 

Point being that whichever route you go down (build your own CMS, joomla, BlueStagStudio CMS - well you never know!) you will probably encounter TinyMCE.

 

Why am I telling you all this? It's buggy as heck and it might take a while to get it working as it should, but they do have very good support forums and a massive following because its used in so many CMS systems.

 

There we go, another essay style answer with hardly anything relevant in it. Slow day. lol.

^^

 

TinyMC is good

 

Whatever path you take you are going to have to do additional work - no such thing as real plug and play in these kind of issues

Here's what I do

 

If its a very small brochure site and they want to be able to edit parts of the site

CushyCMS - its free, web based, and brilliant! All you do is add a class to the containing div and they can edit the content right there on the site.

 

If its a medium site

Wordpress - brilliant for blogs, easy to add pages, easy to use, can train anyone on it in under 30 mins

 

If its a large site

Drupal - probably the most sophisticated open source CMS out there, very powerful, relatively flexable but has a pretty steep learning curve to actually get it to do exactly what you want

 

If its a forum

phpBB3 - Its free and its IMO better than its bloated and expensive brothers IPB and VB

 

If its an ecommerce site...

Well the last one I tried was zencart and I wasn't overly impressed so the jury is out on this one!

 

[edit] actually they're ALL free