
Ask HN: Need to Build a Simple, Stupid CMS. Which Way to Go? - webtechgal
I have been contracted to build a simple, stupid (yet somewhat powerful and not lame) hosted CMS.<p>I have to code it with PHP&#x2F;MySQL (and JavaScript&#x2F;AJAX as needed).<p>It has to be capable of building small, mainly catalog&#x2F;brochure sites, sans a lot of bells and whistles. Ease of use is the most important criteria.<p>I am wondering whether to pick up an open source project and mod it or build from scratch.<p>All suggestions welcome.
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borplk
Please do your client a favour and find a way to use an existing CMS. There
are countless options available.

Building something custom effectively means you are stating that your
requirements somehow happen to be so unique that somehow all the existing
solutions are not adequate. Otherwise it can't be justified.

And the chances of that statement being true is astronomically low.

If you think of it as a spectrum,

One one end there's the "shitty 50 line python script I created for my own
problem in an hour in an afternoon".

On the other extreme end is "new CMS we are building to challenge all the
existing ones because we are in the business of making a new CMS and we have
raised millions and millions".

Everything else in between (where the CMS itself is secondary to a different
primary problem being solved) does not justify the creation of the CMS.

It's like deciding to first manufacture a cook-top because you want to cook a
really tasty dish of scrambled eggs.

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itamarst
Customizing an existing one is better insofar as:

1\. Its usually faster, since you're just writing a plugin or overlay or
whatever on someone else's work.

2\. Makes it easier for customer to hire other people to maintain it when
you've moved on.

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coreymaass
I wrote a single file CMS a couple years ago, similarly out of necessity. It
might be a place to start. Build off of it as you need to.

[https://github.com/gelform/GelCMS](https://github.com/gelform/GelCMS)

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smt88
The best thing for your client is hiring a designer to customize SquareSpace
or something similar. There's absolutely no reason to custom-build something
that's been built and open-sourced a thousand times already, but there's also
no reason to self-host or use a FOSS CMS, either.

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willcate
The last one of those I did from scratch, using Bootstrap for all my CSS
needs, but answer from itamarst below is probably better.

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sharemywin
What's wrong with wordpress?

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eberkund
WordPress is far from simple. Plus anything more than a low traffic site
requires pretty beefy hosting.

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webtechgal
> WordPress is far from simple.

This.

> anything more than a low traffic site requires pretty beefy hosting.

My experience indicates otherwise. A case in point: one of the WordPress sites
I manage averages ~80k page views/day, peaking to well over 125k/day during
peak periods twice a year, and I keep it chugging along happily on a $20/mo
Digital Ocean droplet.

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pwason
ProcessWire.

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webtechgal
Looks good, thanks. Will check it out.

