

Why CMSes suck for front-end developers - onderhond
http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/cms-skinning-html

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jasonkester
The solution to this is simple: Roll your own.

3rd party CMSs seem like such a great thing when you first implement them. But
after a while you always run into the things the author describes. There are
simply no options out there that can compete with a simple CMS that you build
from scratch.

Keep it simple, as in, a few textareas that accept HTML and spit it out
verbatim. Deal with all the SEO bits such as good urls, meta descriptions,
etc. so that it works in the correct way. Incorporate it into your actual site
shell, as opposed to trying to create a fragile little WordPress theme that
sorta looks like your site. Make it modular enough that you can drop it into
every new project you do from here on out.

It'll take you two days to do this. If it takes longer, you're
overengineering. Stop and redesign from scratch for the whole thing to live in
two tables with a half dozen fields each. You don't need a little tree
structure where you can drag nodes around, jQuery style. You just need a table
full of content and a way to display it.

From there, it's maybe a few hours per existing site to rip out the garbage
CMS you're currently using and retrofit yours in its place. You'll never look
back.

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smiler
Surely there must be a product out there which allows you to have complete
control over every aspect of the templates, the HTML and the CSS. Anyone got
any suggestions?

~~~
shib71
I work on one which gives developers total control of front-end views, and is
mainly intended to make it easier to develop new models/behaviour, and add
administration UI. But it gets dismissed because of the server-side language
(Coldfusion). The framework/CMS is FarCry (<http://www.farcrycore.org/>).

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pan69
Simply don't use some prefab CMS. The reason there are about a gazillion CMS's
out there is because it's really easy to write one, opposed to e.g. writing a
really good search engine, which is difficult and there is only one of those.

Use a good web application framework and separate your front facing site from
your content management system.

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DjDarkman
I code a custom CMS when I can't find a CMS that does 99% of my required
features out of the box. Otherwise it's simply not worth my time.

A CMS is lost if tries to dictate the HTML output, sadly most of them do.

My best bet is to use frameworks/libraries to achieve the needed features. I
look at his as a Lego building project.

