Ask YC: How do you decide when to use CMS?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61001

by nurall • 19 years ago

5 13 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We are employing a bottom-up approach to build our rails app. We also do know of a bunch of open-source rails based cms solutions available. But how do you decide what is best for you? Can you comment on the trade-offs?

SwellJoe3• 19 years ago

I've made this mistake four times now (Zope, Plone, OpenACS, Joomla). I think I might have a learning disability that prevents me from ever accepting that the "free" functionality is not worth the cost of the increased complexity of the system.

nurall3• 19 years ago

If you don't mind sharing your experience with these cms freebies, that wud be gr8..

SwellJoe3• 19 years ago

If you aren't aware of them, then you're not subject to their deadly allure. Be grateful.

CMS systems provide:

1. Users and user management, and shared auth across all services (theoretically...Joomla is a joke on this front...nothing useful uses the native user interfaces, they're all bridged applications--at this point our "Joomla website" is actually almost entirely non-Joomla apps bridged into Joomla, and Joomla just makes things like adding new content or new applications harder).

2. Applications sharing a single API. This is least true with Joomla, unfortunately, as it's got the most applications. So, the more apps a CMS offers, the less well-integrated those apps are. In my past two websites I've needed: shopping cart, forums, issue tracker, wiki, and FAQ manager. All but one of those is a bridged app in our current website. They were all integrated, by some definition of integrated, in the OpenACS variant of the site, but OpenACS is a nightmare to work on--second-system syndrome has set in with OACS and it could be years before a Firefox-style simplicity revolution occurs for the codebase (if it has the community enthusiasm for such a rebirth to occur). To be fair to OACS, now that I've switched to Joomla, there are several things that OACS got right that Joomla fails miserably at.

Short answer is that, so far, every time I deploy a CMS, I end up wishing I'd just picked the best of breed applications I needed, and modify them to share a single auth session and state and use the same style. I'm pretty sure that, in the long run, will save a lot of time and offer a better user experience.

Of course, the simple fact is that I really don't need a CMS. I like (the idea of) the applications that come with some of the bigger CMS systems, but the CMS itself is useless to me. Even in a reasonably large company where a CMS seems like the right idea, I found that no one could ever be convinced to use the CMS to add content. When switched to a simple wiki, the website exploded in usefulness to everyone, and everyone started contributing content. CMS systems are just too ornery to use to add content. I've always dreaded the process with all of them except OpenACS (which allowed flat files to be part of the content of the site, unlike other CMS systems that insist on having it in the database). So, the more time I spend with CMS systems, the more I think lots of people are chasing down a deadend road, and I've followed them on more than one occasion.

Can you tell I'm a little frustrated with the state of the CMS world?

jamongkad3• 19 years ago

Don't forget Drupal....why people continue to use it I do not know. Yeah they says it's powerful blah blah blah. But for some reason I'd always had a bad taste in my mouth for Drupal.

SwellJoe3• 19 years ago

I've not used Drupal. I'm only mentioning the CMS systems I've specifically wasted hours of life on making fit my needs. Drupal is actually next on my list of CMS systems to waste hours of my life on making fit my needs...I was kinda hoping it was better than all the other ones I've used. (You see? I'm sick. I have a real problem.)

davidw2• 19 years ago

I basically look at it this way: was it "invented here"? If not, then I build it myself.

nurall3• 19 years ago

wat do you mean by "invented here"? Sorry for my ignorance.. just wanna make sure

juanpablo• 19 years ago

This should clarify it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Invented_Here

But davidw seems to be thinking this way: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html

It might be fun to build you own CMS but, for many of us, could be a distraction from what we actually want to make.

jamongkad3• 19 years ago

Well if you're talking about Content Management then I recommend the Radiant CMS from LongHeart Design. It's pretty lightweight and gets the job done.

rob• 19 years ago

WordPress is great as a CMS.

jamongkad3• 19 years ago

I agree WordPress will always rock in my book. But I think the author is interested in Rails CMS's and Radiant fits the bill. It's a plus to say Radiant come with good documentation.

Ask YC: How do you decide when to use CMS?

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