

Lessons Learned from Shutting Down My Second Startup - venturefizz
http://venturefizz.com/blog/lessons-learned-shutting-down-my-second-startup

======
dasil003
Mirrors a bit of my own experience doing agency work. We actually built a site
for a client Drupal, and then completely scrapped it and rebuilt in Rails
because some seemingly minor interface improvements would have been impossible
to complete due to the structure and interaction of a couple modules.

CMS solutions are good for only one thing: giving people a bunch of
boilerplate functionality when that's all they can afford. Building a product
on top of a CMS is a sure route to a mediocre product surrounded by dead-ends.

~~~
mikeocool
Agree, so very strongly. Got about 4 weeks into a client project with Drupal
and scrapped it in favor of Django. I've been continually mystified every time
I see folks singing its praises, but you bring up a fair point, it provides a
lot of out of the box functionality. Extending or changing that functionality
just turns out to be a nightmare.

~~~
spyrosk
What about hybrids like Silverstripe? Has anyone used it (or something
similar) for large-ish projects? Although personally I use mostly CakePHP, I
began playing with it lately and it seems to me that it has a lot of
potential. Basic CMS functionality is provided out of the box, but I really
like the way you can extend the core classes and integrate your own
functionality into it, without losing the typical ease of use, even for non
developer maintainers/users.

~~~
mashmac2
What differentiates Silverstripe from something like Django? It seems to me
like Django offers 'Basic' CMS functionality, althought how you define that is
up to you :)

~~~
metachris
I personally prefer frameworks that get out of my way over Django which forces
a lot of idioms onto you. Like web.py, and if it's your taste add Jinja and
SQLAlchemy and you've got a decent stack to quickly iterate.

------
metachris
One of the gems in this post:

" _Self-motivation is not an ability that once you have it, you keep it. It’s
a reservoir of will that’s filled with ambition, enjoyment, good humor, and
small successes. It’s drained by mundanity, difficulty, failures, and fears.
If you’re not refilling that reservoir on a regular basis, you will find
yourself attempting to escape or avoid further drain._ "

