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CMS OR NO CMS?


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Dear readers,

I have a dilemma on how to start making a website I want to build. Options so far are to use a CMS such as Joomla/Drupal or start it from scratch.

Points I have in mind:

For CMS

  • Previous experience with CMS (without modifying actual files)
  • Quick
  • Great variety of plugins and templates

Against CMS

  • Might look cheap
  • Advantage of working with a designer if built from scratch(good for experience)
  • will be flexible

My background:

I am a student studying computer science altho I do not have a great experience with web building ... just made few simple ones (altho when it comes to design ... im an absolute newbie). Therefore it would be good to gain experience to work side by side with a designer ... but this can be costly? and making the website can be time consuming ... so is this worth it? Also ... how flexible can a CMS be? i.e. how hard is it to manually customize it?

Any suggestions are welcome. Also feel free to include other options other than building from scratch or using CMS. Used libraries such as JQuery in the past ... and loved it ... any similar libraries you guys knw abt?

Thanks a bunch!

Kind Regards,

Newton

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a CMS with a custom theme can be the furthest away from "cheap". you can still work with a designer and build the theme to your needs, you just need to learn the CMS's theming APIs to make the magic happen after you have the design, instead of writing everything yourself.

I'd also suggest WordPress instead of Drupal or Joomla, it's much easier to work with and imo more flexible for the amount of work you put into it.

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a CMS with a custom theme can be the furthest away from "cheap". you can still work with a designer and build the theme to your needs, you just need to learn the CMS's theming APIs to make the magic happen after you have the design, instead of writing everything yourself.

I'd also suggest WordPress instead of Drupal or Joomla, it's much easier to work with and imo more flexible for the amount of work you put into it.

Hey! Thanks for the reply!

WordPress seems interesting ... altho isnt it mainly for blogging? Or can I create a business style website using wordpress?

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Hey! Thanks for the reply!

WordPress seems interesting ... altho isnt it mainly for blogging? Or can I create a business style website using wordpress?

check out this post. WP doesn't come with the more advanced CMS stuff set up for you, but they're very easy to activate and/or add with a plugin. Especially if you're making a theme from scratch which you can design to take advantage of exactly the features you need. Traditional CMSes on the other hand try to give you everything you'll need by default, which I found was rather confusing on first install while you navigate through the pages of administration stuff half of which you probably won't use immediately. I personally prefer adding in the functionality that I need, when I need it, around a solid core, instead of having this huge general purpose installation and leaving features unused.

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Thanks for that post. Seems really interesting :) . After reading your message, I started looking up which cms to use, now including WP into my search. So here are my first impressions ... please correct me if I am wrong:

  • Wordpress is lightweight but not developer friendly at all
  • Drupal is developer friendly ... and thus not user friendly
  • Joomla - mixture of both

I got these opinions mainly from http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html

It would be great to have a second opinion. Note: the website I am trying to build will not promote a product, but will be itself the product ... so guessing it would require quite a bit of backend-frontend customisation. What do you reckon? :rolleyes:

Newton

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Thanks for that post. Seems really interesting :) . After reading your message, I started looking up which cms to use, now including WP into my search. So here are my first impressions ... please correct me if I am wrong:

  • Wordpress is lightweight but not developer friendly at all
  • Drupal is developer friendly ... and thus not user friendly
  • Joomla - mixture of both

I got these opinions mainly from http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html

It would be great to have a second opinion. Note: the website I am trying to build will not promote a product, but will be itself the product ... so guessing it would require quite a bit of backend-frontend customisation. What do you reckon? :rolleyes:

Newton

that article is a bit outdated, WP3 was only released a couple of weeks ago and it added a lot of CMS functionality that didn't exist before. I'm not sure where it got the idea that WordPress is not developer friendly. I've consistently been surprised by how much easier it is to implement something than I had imagined, and the codex is extremely helpful. It is as the article stated a new entrant into the CMS arena, and it's not as robust as Drupal for advanced CMS stuff, but people have been using it as a CMS even before it was intended to be one. It really depends on your needs and what kind of website you're running. You're probably not going to be able to run Amazon off WordPress, whereas Drupal seems reasonable. another thing to keep in mind is that WordPress is very stringent about valid code, and generates valid XHTML. I'm not as familiar with the other two but I've never seen a Joomla site that's properly coded.. or even that many Joomla sites at all, Drupal on the other hand powers a bunch of high profile websites.

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Wordpress is lightweight but not developer friendly at all

How so? I've ripped the guts out of it numerous times to make it do my bidding.

Also, OP: You seem to be slightly confusing the back-end script with the front-end design? Why would a CMS make a site look cheap?

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I mainly work with Joomla and it's always been my favorite. I've done several Wordpress sites also, and I do agree it's better for more "personal" sites or blogging, at least IMHO. I just couldn't wrap my head around Drupal, but know a lot of people that like it also. You can use just about any template you can create manually and put it in just about any of those with some help from someone experience with theming.

Anyway, I say Joomla. You can get got a lot of professional templates that don't look cheap at all. Wordpress probably has better quality free templates though. Most of the free Joomla templates I see are pretty cheesy, and the variety of good free ones is limited.

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If you must use a CMS, it really depends on the size of your website. If you have a website with only around 10-20 pages, using Joomla or Drupal is a bit of overkill. If you do have a small website, however, I would recommend Get Simple, if your website is larger than 10-20 pages, out of Joomla or Drupal, I'd go with Drupal.

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Thanks all for your replies. It has been really helpful. I am tempted to start the website off with the new version of WP ... seems very neat, but I still havent given up on Drupal.

I think I am going to discard Joomla since I havent had many positive replies about it.

The website I am trying to built is one whose main focus is a search engine, similar to those are present on flight booking websites. With this in mind ... would you guys go with Drupal or WP?

Thanks

Newton

Against CMS

* Might look cheap

ps. I take this back completely. I think I have re-discovered the power of CMS! :D

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I would suggest WordPress. With WP 3.0, it has become very very good CMS. It is not the blog-only tool anymore, you can build a fully functional website in it. If you want to try it, use wordpress.com

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Thanks all for your replies. It has been really helpful. I am tempted to start the website off with the new version of WP ... seems very neat, but I still havent given up on Drupal.

I think I am going to discard Joomla since I havent had many positive replies about it.

The website I am trying to built is one whose main focus is a search engine, similar to those are present on flight booking websites. With this in mind ... would you guys go with Drupal or WP?

Thanks

Newton

if that's an accurate description then I'd lean toward Drupal. it really depends on what you need to do with it, do you need a shopping cart of sorts? what kind of server side functionality are you going to use, etc.

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if that's an accurate description then I'd lean toward Drupal. it really depends on what you need to do with it, do you need a shopping cart of sorts? what kind of server side functionality are you going to use, etc.

It is pretty much an accurate description ... website will be similar to one such as flight scanner (although the search will be simpler). It wont have a shopping cart tho (at least in the first stages of the product), it will simply be used as a specific search engine.

I am currently hosting both WP and Drupal on my server just to try them out. Hosting it on asmallorange.com ... therefore linux hosting.

Newton

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