Posted by Adam on 09/25/06 14:56

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.

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