

Who uses a CMS to manage their sites? - bmaier

Anyone run an open source cms to manage their startup's site?  What do you guys use?  Drupal?  Joomla?  something else? any huge downsides to running a cms and not going from scratch?
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SwellJoe
Our website started on OpenACS, and then moved to Joomla. I've also built a
large website with Zope/Plone.

All of them suck so bad they make me want to kick someone.

If I were starting today, I'd probably choose Drupal, but I'm sure I'd live to
regret that as well. The smart money is probably on picking a "good enough"
implementation of all of the individual features you need, and then make them
all share session, and then write a custom login and user management page or
two. You shouldn't imagine that any of them is a cohesive set of tools with a
standardized codebase using a common set of functions.

That's pretty much what our Joomla site ended up being, only with the added
pain of having to manage all of the content through Joomla (which is
atrocious...give me flat files over that any day). So, I've spent months
learning this big pile of code only to end up using it as a glorified session
and authentication handler--the more I use the "native" Joomla tools, the less
I like them. And it forces horrible URLs onto you unless you build a custom
URL mapper for every application and use one of the SEF tools.

Admittedly, I'm not a fan of PHP, and so my discomfort is increased by working
in a language that makes me feel a little ill (no first class functions? how
does that even happen in a modern language?)...but nonetheless, the more work
I do with websites like this, the more I think content management systems are
a bad idea unless you're using them for the very, very, very specific set of
problems the developer first set out to solve (I can't figure out what that is
for Joomla, since it's so painful to use for just about anything, including
managing content, but I'm sure there's a core of useful functionality in there
that the project was first started to provide).

I'm going to try Drupal for a community site I'm planning for our Open Source
tools, but I may end up giving up on that. It's just hard to know how painful
things are going to be until you have users banging on it, and you have to dig
deep to address problems they find. It wasn't until we'd actually launched our
new site that all of the bugs in Joomla, Fireboard, Flyspray (mainly the
bridge), VirtueMart, and other components came to light. Many still
remain...If I knock out one bug a week, I'm pretty happy (the system is big,
and the bugs run deep). Note also, that all of those apps have their own
stylesheets and templates--you aren't even getting cohesive styling, unless
you build the templates to match for every single application.

My ideal would be if every application out there had a very simple
authentication callback interface, so you could tell it to get the session
state from anywhere (maybe OpenID will make this a reality). It'd make it so
easy to build a full-featured website--and no big over-arching framework
needed. You could even use different languages for your apps...

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marrone
Ive had to use Joomla in the past, and I agree with you. I hated it.

A CMS is good to get you kick started, after all who wants to build another
boring login script? But if you are serious about your app, I think you have
to roll your own. Simply because with any set of code provided for general
use, it will never fit perfectly to your needs. And I think it is that extra
bit of perfection, the 'icing on the cake' that makes your app special and
stand out. It is much harder to accomplish that using someone else's code than
writing your own specifically for your own purposes.

Cal Henderson in his excellent book 'Building Scalable Websites' mentions
writing his own file transfer protocol for a middle-ware file storage system.
His reason was that it was custom made for Flickr's needs and thus was faster
than anything available.

A quote I heard somewhere about Catering Fake, when asked what tools she
recommended to build a web app, she responded 'PHP' (in other words, she
suggested using no tools, and to build your own).

------
michele
We use Pagety, but we built it, so it's normal we really like it! ;)

~~~
marrone
uh, not that my above comment was to say that all CMSs are bad. What I meant,
was that like everything else, they have a time and a place. I checked out
Pagety and liked it

