Categorised under: Content management
Paul Chin argues against writing your own CMS. To quote:
I was recently asked something that I myself have been wondering for a while: Does anyone still build intranet-based content management systems (CMS) from scratch? And more importantly, is there any real advantage in doing so?
James Robertson is the Managing Director of Step Two Designs, the global thought leaders on intranets, headquartered in Sydney, Australia. James is the author of What every intranet team should know, along with hundreds of articles and reports. He has keynoted conferences around the globe. (Email James)
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3 Comments:
We did and I wouldn’t. It was a very expensive way to get an underpowered site. A manager made that decision after a nice dinner with some enthusiastic programmers, it pretty much cost her her job, and it still hasn’t delivered the desired functionality. That company is basically waiting a polite amount of time before telling their board it was a waste of a lot of money and replacing it with something a lot cheaper and better.
An all too common story.
Still, I think there are two different situations:
* Common website needs, which should be met by an out-of-the-box CMS (either closed or open source).
* Unique needs, which will require custom development, up to and including the creation of an entirely custom CMS.
It’s the grey area between these two situations which cause so much difficulty…
As all organisations believe they are unique and special (like all people), it’s no surprise to me that some organisations still take this route.
I’ve also seen (and experienced) situations where a CMS is built unintentionally by stealth – where no CMS exists but people have updating needs, so little bits of a CMS are built one by one until it is rolled into a single system by ICT.
More interesting to me is whether organisations are writing extensions to existing CMSes – and how many share them with other organisations via marketplaces or where there is no direct competition.