Custom CMS???
- Started
- Last post
- 21 Responses
- Amicus
Anyone here got any experience creating a custom CMS?
I'm researching creating one for a largish community website utilising some google and other APIs like calendars, weather widgets etc.
Need to have the ability to have various levels of membership.
Any thoughts? How long would this sort of thing take and cost?
- airey0
wordpress. perfect for that.
- Amicus0
It can handle 5000 members and 1000s of pages with many sections?
Sorry for my naivety...
- Amicus0
you looking for this kind of work airey???
- airey0
yep. it woul obviously need to be hosted on a decent hosting package to allow constant delivery but yep.
basically as it's a rock-solid foundation it allows infinite tweaking and as it's open source there's a hug number of already existing plugins / extensions as well as a healthy community of expert and non-expert help.
look into it and make you're own mind up but i honestly think you'd be hard pressed to find a better solution.
i could be wrong of course.
- graham4140
Yea I figure Zend is the way to go.
- Amicus0
any names... anyone want to give this project a shot?
- speedlab0
You might want to look into Drupal. It is probably the best solution at this point if you want to build a social community. WordPress is great for blogs, comments and syndicating your comment, Drupal will give you all of that and more. Drupal has a steep learning curve, you might need some extra help if web development is not in your skillset, but the payoff in the end will be worth it. For a well designed, and developed site, excluding hosting fee's you'd be looking at $5,000-$7,500 or more, it all depends on the scope.
- From my experience, don't touch Drupal. Wordpress is far better in many ways.Nightshade
- airey0
to speedlab: that's not strictly true of wordpress anymore. that may have been true of old, but since the 2.3 update wordpress has gone on from strength to strength. in the last year it has become quite amazing in it's options and extensibility.
- PascalT0
shoot me an email. i know a guy who is working on a pretty sweet CMS and it's quite advanced. maybe you can have a word with him.
p[at]makeshift.ca
- heavyt0
admittedly a skeptic of any off-the-shelf CMS -
@airey, is WP paying you to advocate so highly?WP is a good product, but I dont think I would praise it as highly as @airey has. A custom CMS will always be better. Always. You may be able to get a lot for a little money with an off the shelf product, but you are going to make compromises.
I have a CMS framework that I designed, and I know a lot of developers who have done the same. That speeds up development time a little, but offers an efficient solution while at the same time giving you any feature you want.
Frankly, I couldnt care less what you end up using for the "next facebook" or whatever you are building. Lord knows the world needs another community site. But, if you can afford to, hire a developer that can build you a custom system. You will appreciate it in the end.
- airey0
totally agree with heavyt. i'm just advocating wp as it's been a great solution for me. the fact that it's open source saves being stuck with a developer you don't as the number of devs using this is growing rapidly, plus the cost of doing so is fantastic.
like anything, it depends on budget and timeframes.
- airey0
there's a few articles worth looking at but this could be a good start:
wp and social networks
http://www.readwriteweb.com/arch…ruby on rails info:
http://rubyonrails.org/
http://www.amazon.com/Practical-…- but listen to PascalIT or heavyT as i'd say they have more of an idea. i'm a clueless enthusiast.airey
- stewdio0
If you're serious about building a new CMS, I've got experience. You can contact me through http://stewdio.org/. But you also need to be realistic about time and cost. I would love the opportunity to sink my teeth into such a project but only if the pay allows me to put aside other pursuits and still pay rent.
Some other provisos: Designing a new CMS using PHP would be an incredibly poor idea. You wouldn't be contributing anything new or worthwhile to your community. PHP's time is over. It is an ugly language. Ruby on Rails seems a good way to go. Python Django definitely has its merits too. For some real excitement though I'd design the thing ground-up in Arc or another Lisp dialect. To me that's the future.
Arc (a dialect of Lisp)
http://arclanguage.org
- airey0
expression engine and social networks:
http://ryanirelan.com/blog/entry…
- OSFA0
I know there have been some layoffs, and I've read a few posts of some quality qbners looking for freelance, so here's an opportunity for whoever is interested...
We received a request for a full site re-design, including a custom CMS. The guy that used to work on these relocated due to the financial crisis...blah blah... and we're looking for either a company or programmer that knows CMS, PHP, the whole nine yards...
So, if you need more details or if you're interested, email me.
- trooperbill0
custom cms = PAIN!
seriously you're far better off skinning an existing app/framework - it will help control scope creep (because you dont wanna build any bespoke modules) and it will be stable and secure.
ive been involved in loads of cms projects and people expect the technology to fit around their individual way of doing things which usually means making a complete ass of it.
- Nightshade0
At my last agency we used a custom CMS built in-house. We were a small agency so it was built by one developer. Anyway when he left the company, he left us in all kinds of problems trying to use/customise the CMS further, as no-one quite understood it. In the end we had to abandon it (months of work) and use Wordpress instead, which turned out to be a far better CMS.
Just something to watch out for.