

Ask HN: We built a rock-solid, easy-to-use CMS. Now what? - toptray

background: 14-person marketing/webdev studio. We built a rock-solid, easy-to-use, easy-to-implement, extensible CMS.<p>We've entertained thoughts of releasing as a product to the over-crowded CMS market, mainly because we've had some rave reviews converting a few Joomla and Drupal sites to it; not to mention the positive response on new sites from ground up. Currently running behind about 120 sites.<p>It is proprietary now, but the door isn't closed on open-sourcing it down the road. While proprietary, the data formats are open and presentation is well separated from the system (making the move away from our product easy if a client wanted to go that direction). Clients are always shocked when we tell them "look, if you want to go in a different direction in the future, here is the database, here is your data in the database, here are functions to export to many standard formats."<p>Would like some ideas/thoughts on:
-stress testing
-security audit resources &#38; methodology.
-experience with launching a CMS product.
-general advice (we are ad/marketing folks first and foremost, but have strong tech knowledge on staff).<p>thanks.
======
pbhjpbhj
OK I have a Joomla site I manage, what's my incentive to switch? What are your
uniques?

Presumably I have to host with you, what are your uptime guarantees, what are
your charges?

I'm interested that you spent time to build from scratch rather than adapting
a current FOSS offering; presumably you had a plan but think it's not going to
work?

------
cookiecaper
I think you'll have an easier time making it in this space if you're open-
source from the get-go. A CMS can be customized a thousand ways, and even if
you think your CMS is the greatest CMS ever, the variety of needs is just too
great for a closed product to work well.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I'm a big lover of FOSS but I'm not sure really. There is a wide variety of
needs but I wonder how many plugins the average Wordpress user really uses.
Presumably they're not imagining they'll take the entire market just a
segment, perhaps the click-to-edit|edit-in-place part?

