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Homebrew CMS

Seth Gottlieb has written an article about the perils of writing a homebrew CMS. To quote:

I have seen (and replaced) enough home-grown content management systems to know that they are not as easy to build as you would think. As a software architect, I understand the temptation. You just want something simple and you don't want to put up with all the compromises, limitations, and cost that a CMS framework comes with. After all, its just a matter of writing some data to the database and then presenting that same data elsewhere. We have all designed dozens of systems that do that! And look! You can even download a free WYSIWYG editor to make your homebrew CMS usable?

But before you go ahead and build the one billion and first CMS, here are some things that typically burn generalist architects when they try to design their first CMS.

This is an excellent list, and it accords with my personal experiences (I actually started my content management journey a decade ago by writing a custom CMS for technical writers). I would just add one extra item to this list:

Editing environment. If the authors can't easily and efficiently get their words onto the site, you're toast. There's a huge amount that goes into a good editing tool, including table support, CSS, images, spell checking, and clean cut-and-pasting from Word. Even if you chose to use one of the commercial editing tools (a good idea!), it still needs to be tightly integrated into the CMS.

Posted by jamesr on July 27, 2007 10:05 AM
Categories: Content management