Thoughts
Is Another CMS Worth It? June 26, 2008
Lately I’ve been pretty fascinated with Content Management Systems. For those not “in the know”, its basically a program that allows a website’s content to be editable through a web browser. As a web designer, they’re pretty addictive to play with and see which ones would be best for client projects, and for my own projects. The idea of them is great, you can design a website, handling all of the big picture stuff, and then let the client deal with all of the nitty gritty details that they want to change later on down the road.
But I don’t feel like I’ve found the perfect one so far. I’ve played with so many different ones on the website Open Source CMS, and I’ve installed a bunch to experiment around with on my own server. (To be exact I’ve tried Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, CMS Made Simple, Expression Engine, Frog, Website Baker, and MODx… phew!) I have some individual critiques of each one, and some critiques of all of them as a whole, but I’m not going to get into that right now. (Maybe in another post down the road)
I’ve had a few ideas of my own for how I would create a CMS, and I would love to think through and design a CMS the way clients and designers would want to use one, instead of the way a developer or coder thinks about one. What designer wants to teach their client HTML just so they can update their website? That never works. I feel like there is a large gap in all of the CMS offerings out there right now that could be filled.
But is it really worth the time? I mean first of all I don’t even know how to program more than a simple if/then statment, so I’d need to coerce a programmer to help me out. And really, even if they did the coding and I did the designing, would it be worth the investment of time to work on yet another CMS? Is there room in the market for just one more? Is it already oversaturated?
If anyone even knows what I’m talking about, and has any suggestions or words of advice, please let me know. If you’re a programmer with a lot of spare time on your hands, you should let me know that too.
4 Responses to “Is Another CMS Worth It?”
Jens June 27th, 2008 12:03 pm
You should give silverstripe a try – its at silverstripe.com . . [I have no relationship with them - we do Drupal :-)]. I tried it on some of my personal sites and its an amazing framework.
Ryan Thrash June 27th, 2008 4:54 pm
Hi Jesse,
Would love to hear more about how you’d make a more client-friendly UI as we still have lots of room for improvement. Now is a great time considering our total rewrite effort is looking for folks to join the fray, and we’re about to take a deep dive into usability and the UI. Why look for a single dev when you could work with an entire team at MODx? ;) In all seriousness though thanks for mentiomong us amongst those other great projects.
Jesse June 30th, 2008 9:43 pm
Thanks for the comments guys. I’ve played around with Silverstripe for a couple of seconds, but I’ll give it a second look. I’m also interested in learning more about MODx and possibly helping out. I’ll be in contact.
Jesse Sutherland v2.0 » Open Sourcing my CMS Idea July 7th, 2009 9:50 pm
[...] inspiration from both Frog and Wordpress. I showed it to a few programmer buddies, but when we considered the whole gambit of competing CMS’s, we decided there wasn’t a market, nor a need for [...]
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