CMS: Build or Buy?

This question is a little subjective, however, it aims to give me a bit of information about whether it is better to build or buy.

My company is looking to enter the world of CMSs for our clients websites, do we provide an open source one, or do we build our own model from scratch?

If you buy, which do you use?

If you build, how does your architecture differ?

EDIT: The CMS we are looking to use isn't to maintain our own website, it is something we can offer our clients and pinned onto websites we are custom building for them, it needs to be something that we adapt and manipulate easily for many different website designs and purposes.

How about using opensource one? :-)

Today the only reasons to develop new CMS are:

1) non-usual requirements (deadly rare)

2) You just like to code "your own CMS" ©


If none is the case, take opensource one.

Personally, I have my own CMS for all my private & commercial purposes, but this was mostly just for programming fun. If you need to deliver, you have to use existing products.

This depends heavily on what you need, but many CMSs are a platform that you can build upon, getting the best of both worlds.

* Wordpress has a very rich plug-in framework.

* If you are ok with Windows servers, SharePoint has an extensive plug-in/extension architecture.

I don't think there's any reason to build from scratch unless you are planning to compete in the CMS market.

The company I work for wrestled with this same question recently. This depends a lot on your client's expertise and needs. It's generally not advisable to build your own CMS unless you're using it to offer something very novel.

Drupal has lots of plugins available giving a great deal of customizability. It's handy in the same way that most CMSs are in that you can use PHP files as your templates and code them outside of the CMS.

Wordpress has the best user interface of all the CMS's I've used (Drupal, EE, Wordpress, Joomla). If you need to program plugins it's also very well documented and (when the plugin is finished) provides a drag-and-drop interface for the client to make changes to their own web site easily.

I'm currently in the process of moving our site from EE to WP.

Do not reinvent the wheel. It takes really a lot of time and money to make a CMS.

If I were you, I would go with an open source CMS, start building custom stuff and contribute back what you can (this is how the company works where I work).

My choice is Drupal, because of the rich set of contribs, excellent flexibility/extensibility and good security.

I think it depends on how many clients are supposed to use the CMS.

We have only one client and built a proprietary CMS which we heavily customize to the client's specific needs.
It also gives us a strategic benefit since this client can hardly migrate his web sites to another company now.

If you have a couple (> 2) of clients who are supposed to use the CMS, IMHO an open source CMS would be the best choice.

Well I can build a simple CMS in less than a day (and everybody can do that with any good web framework). So it depends on how complex it is and how much the open source solutions can do what you want your CMS to do. I generally avoid to use open source CMS because it is usually an overkill compared with my usual client's needs but that's me. Most open source CMS (drupal, joomla, wordpress) have many features that most people simply don't care and they clutter their user interface, so I prefer to build my own as far as it is simple instead of using an open source and struggling to add a new feature and make it scalable.

**Can you develop a new CMS as good as some other ones that have been around for years and hundreds of people have worked on it's development?**

That's a question I always ask myself at the start of every website buliding project.
There is surely a good open source platform that meets your requierments and that you can improve.

I suggest these:

[Liferay][1] : for large organisations and advanced projects it's written in java. I personally love this CMS. Big places like NASA use it and my company used it for a project, it was great.


[Plone][2] : Same as above - language = Python

[EZPublish][3] for large organisations but not as advanced as Liferay - language = PHP

Joomla and drupal for normal websites.


[1]:

[To see links please register here]

[2]:

[To see links please register here]

[3]:

[To see links please register here]

A very important reason why you may want to choose something that is already made (FOSS or commercial) is that someone else may be able to support it.

PS

I've used CMSMS on various projects. It has enough user control to let them edit, but not mess with the layout and stuff.

As a design agency, presumably with a number of customers with live websites that constantly need to change that are taking manpower away from new projects,

My first question would be if I intend to migrate my existing customers to the CMS based version of their site

Then, What are the commonalities/differences in your customer sites?

If there is a lot of commonality (in the back end code as opposed to the front end design), then maybe integrating a basic article editor is all you need?

Look at how a CMS is going to affect your design flow, Your designs will then be CMS 'Themes', that'll be a learning curve.

I'm not trying to discourage you from Buying or Building a CMS, but the decision will be completely decided by your companies situation.

Personally I use Joomla and DotNetNuke. I'm a developer not a designer, so I buy off the shelf themes and modify them. I also had no existing clients when I started out. I decided to use a CMS specifically because I could buy themes, and secondry to that was the client modifying the articles.