

Ask YC: CMS? opinions? - xenoterracide

we are developing web software, although we decided that our company might want to make more than one thing so our first product is going to be seen as that and not the company itself.<p>We aren't interested in building a company site from scratch since there are good cms' available.<p>what do people recommend? or would it really be better to build one from scratch since we are supposed to be a web software company.<p>EDIT: I've been thinking about using Joomla but really haven't decided.<p>EDIT: on another thought does anyone know of any that are postgres friendly? that's the db we are using for our first product.
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SwellJoe
CMS means way too many things these days, and most of them (both the things it
means and the software that calls itself CMS) are a bad idea. I say this as
someone who has deployed not one, not two, not three, not four, but _five_
large scale CMS systems (Zope, Plone, custom thing based on MoinMoin and trac,
OpenACS, and finally Joomla). Deployments used by thousands of users for a
wide variety of activities.

CMS systems are usually too big to be right for any particular purpose, and so
the majority of your development time is spent ripping out the stuff that gets
in the way of your users doing what they want to do at your site...Joomla is
actually the worst in this regard, though it shines in a few areas (large
number of available applications...though I was disappointed to find that 90%
of them are absolute garbage and not worth the time it takes to install them,
much less the time it would take to make them look right on your site).

Right now, I'm still maintaining the Joomla site, and not terribly happy with
it. Since I have to migrate from 1.0.x to 1.5.x, and this is not a trivial
project, I'm considering moving to something else. The lazy in me likes the
looks of Drupal--all the apps we need (commerce, forums, bug tracker, wiki)
would be reasonably easy to put together. But, I think I would be better
served by slowly moving all of our very specific requirements (our shop is
dead simple, but has very specific requirements for the licensing of our
software, for example) out to small custom tools--written in one of our
preferred languages--and spend a little bit of time coding shared
authentication into the best forums package and the best wiki and the best bug
tracker. Since, really, in the end Joomla provides almost nothing for us but a
very poor shared authentication system (poor because several of the apps have
mysterious bugs that lead to some users being unable to stay logged in
throughout a purchase or filing a bug) and a really bad way to update our site
data--we only use the "CMS" features for five or six pages on the site, and
the editor in Joomla sucks and there is no good way to use the file system for
pages.

Anyway, if I had to choose a CMS today, I'd probably choose Drupal, but I
think we'll end up with the non-CMS solution to our problems I discussed
above. Multiple apps customized to share session data, plus a few small
components written exactly for our requirements. Some of the frameworks make
this latter kind of deployment easier--Django and Ruby On Rails modules can
share authentications reasonably easily.

The thing is, while it looks like you're getting a lot of stuff for free from
the existing CMS systems (Joomla, in particular, because it has 80 bazillion
available plugins) you actually end up spending a _lot_ of time on
customization and cleaning out the crap you don't need. At least, I did. It
took me a couple of months to launch our Joomla site, and about a month to
launch the OpenACS site before that doing the same job (OpenACS was nicer, by
some measures, but it had some serious bugs that weren't getting fixed, and
the architecture had become too baroque in version 5 to be reasonably
customizable--too many behaviors were baked into the core libraries making it
very hard to build custom tools...the docs were also broken beyond belief).

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iamdave
I hate to be "that guy" but can you maybe phrase that in less extraneous
rhetoric?

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SwellJoe
Probably not. You should give it try, though.

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babul
Opensource = Drupal (I think it is better than Joomla and has even been
adopted by IBM into a opensource product for enterprise use)

Proprioretory = Vignette or Documentum (Both are excellent and can be used on
small and really large sites with all sorts of added features suitable for
online collaboration)

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run4yourlives
I'm not sure what amount of time a cms would save you.

If it's a smaller site, I'd just use wordpress for easy blogging capability.
All the stuff that a CMS would help you with (like dumbing down markup and
such) wouldn't be worth my time, to be honest.

Depends on what you're doing though, really.

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xenoterracide
wordpress might work. We don't need much since it'll mostly be a point for
talking about the company... I doubt we do much with it.

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SwellJoe
"I doubt we do much with it."

If that's the case, why are you looking for a CMS?!

Since obviously no one else has told you this, I will:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use a CMS."
Now they have two problems.

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xenoterracide
well maybe I should put it this way. I personally am not seeing that site as a
main development focus. I honestly haven't thought too much about it. There
also might be some minor parts of the site that are hard to do with straight
blog technology (although I've never used wordpress). That are more designed
in to cms.

but as of right now I really don't have much planned into the site.

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jdg
Wordpress. Really.

Don't build one from scratch - it's a waste of your time, unless you're
planning on turning it into a product later on.

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babul
WP is good for blogs but not much else in terms of general website usage esp
compared to Drupal/Joomla.

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bkbleikamp
Agreed - it is definitely possible to hack WP to run as a general content
management system, but it is still based on the idea of a blog, and so content
is still organized as "posts" and "pages" which can get old and will cause
many sites to hit limitations that require more hacking to get through.

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rantfoil
If you like Rails, Mephisto is a pretty flexible way to get a lot of
functionality for less work.

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luct
It depends on the effort to build from scratch, and a marketable product.

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blender
Drupal, it's not really a CMS so much as it's a framework

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xenoterracide
huh... never heard that about Drupal. makes me even more interested in
checking it out.

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slim
why not use a wiki? its simple, flexible and with the right template it does
the job.

try dokuwiki it's my favorite and it uses text files for storage.

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xenoterracide
wiki's are one of the most abused softwares (as in used where they shouldn't
be). In fact one of our current competitors uses a wiki for what we're
building custom software for. It's such a PoS, you can tell it wasn't designed
for that use. We might use a wiki for internal documentation at some point.

