Should I write my own CMS?

It seems to me that these days successful community web sites are purpose-built. They don't have a lot of extraneous junk, are easy to navigate and are fun to use. StackOverflow is a good example here. For your web site to be successful your user interface will be very important.

If you want ultimate control over your user interface, then your best bet is to build it on your own. You can start with the code base of something that you like, or at least use it as a working example.

Fortunately, as long as you have reasonable programming skills to begin with the web tools that are available these days can make you very productive after a reasonable learning curve is surmounted.

At the end of the day, if you build it yourself, you'll have a web site that is very flexible, and looks exactly how you want it. If you use someone else's code, the you'll get the web site up faster and with more features, but it won't be as flexible and you'll probably have to make some concessions on look and feel.

roll out your own :)

you will gain experience (which is priceless), and on top of that you will end up with something thats not bloated...

No.

"Don't Reinvent The Wheel, Unless You Plan on Learning More About Wheels".

I'd focus on learning about each of the tools and how you can integrate them together, instead of writing a CMS.

I have to stress barfoon's comment not to reinvent the wheel. There's plenty a learning experience to be had in taking someone else's CMS and learning how to use and develop against it.

Additionally, you will learn a great deal if you take an open source project and look through how they decided to design their product. *Then*, upon understanding how theirs works, you can either contribute to the project or even branch out on your own, but this way has several advantages:

- You know what you're getting into (CMS can be a big task)
- Depending which one you choose, there's a good amount of community support for existing CMS products which is valuable
- You will have likely learned a good approach by seeing their code
- Learning their product/code takes less time than building your own, so you're less likely to lose motivation than if you started building one from scratch

That said, I personally recommend you take a look at [Magnolia][1]. It has community support, it's Open Source, and it's a quality system.

G'luck


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I'd go with WordPress myself for the scope of the project that you'd defined. [Simple Press Forum][1] is a robust, full-featured forum plugin for WordPress and it's fairly easy to integrate MediaWiki. There's also a [WordPress wiki plugin project][2] that could use the hours it seems like you're willing to commit. WordPress can do everything that you've described in a weekend.


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You don't need to re-invent the weel to gain experience.

I'd go for Wordpress.
I'm using it for my website (

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), and I believe I have a fairly advanced website. I've certainly increased my PHP programming skills.

I've tried getting my head around Drupal as well. It is very good CMS, but a pain in the ass to learn.

Even with 5 years of developing on other CMS systems (.NET), I was not able to master Drupal after 1 month of trying.

I'm no hardcore programmer, but I believe an CMS should be fairly easy to use.

So I've chosen Wordpress.
It has it's limitations, but you can create your own plugins to compensate for this.

As a true developer, you will have desires for large amounts of customizations. A lot of pre-packaged CMS/blogs have plugin systems, but to me they all feel a little odd when I have to register my code with the system via a database entry.

To be honest, I've had my blog in wordpress, rewrote my own in PHP, and I've since then rewrote it twice in Django.

Each time gets faster, each time you want to do something more, and each time you learn yourself about all the usability and security issues that the people who created the very large projects have to go through.

The rewrites were a valuable experience, and I would never take the "Don't reinvent the wheel," argument. I feel as though I can look at a wheel and tell you what is wrong with it, considering I personally invented it =P