4 ms·

Why CMSes suck for front-end developers

4 points by onderhond 16y ago

jasonkester 16y ago
The solution to this is simple: Roll your own. 3rd party CMSs seem like such a great thing when you first implement them. But after a while you always run into the things the author describes. There are simply no options out there that can compete with a simple CMS that you build from scratch. Keep it simple, as in, a few textareas that accept HTML and spit it out verbatim. Deal with all the SEO bits such as good urls, meta descriptions, etc. so that it works in the correct way. Incorporate it into your actual site shell, as opposed to trying to create a fragile little WordPress theme that sorta looks like your site. Make it modular enough that you can drop it into every new project you do from here on out. It'll take you two days to do this. If it takes longer, you're overengineering. Stop and redesign from scratch for the whole thing to live in two tables with a half dozen fields each. You don't need a little tree structure where you can drag nodes around, jQuery style. You just need a table full of content and a way to display it. From there, it's maybe a few hours per existing site to rip out the garbage CMS you're currently using and retrofit yours in its place. You'll never look back.
smiler 16y ago
Surely there must be a product out there which allows you to have complete control over every aspect of the templates, the HTML and the CSS. Anyone got any suggestions?
- jasonkester 16y ago
  PHP, Rails, Django and ASP.NET come to mind. Anything more specialized tends to cater towards letting content owners edit things, which necessarilly puts "Rich Editor" on the feature list, which in every case makes it useless for developers.
- shib71 16y ago
  I work on one which gives developers total control of front-end views, and is mainly intended to make it easier to develop new models/behaviour, and add administration UI. But it gets dismissed because of the server-side language (Coldfusion). The framework/CMS is FarCry (http://www.farcrycore.org/ http://www.farcrycore.org/).
pan69 16y ago
Simply don't use some prefab CMS. The reason there are about a gazillion CMS's out there is because it's really easy to write one, opposed to e.g. writing a really good search engine, which is difficult and there is only one of those. Use a good web application framework and separate your front facing site from your content management system.
DjDarkman 16y ago
I code a custom CMS when I can't find a CMS that does 99% of my required features out of the box. Otherwise it's simply not worth my time. A CMS is lost if tries to dictate the HTML output, sadly most of them do. My best bet is to use frameworks/libraries to achieve the needed features. I look at his as a Lego building project.

4 points by onderhond 16y ago

The solution to this is simple: Roll your own. 3rd party CMSs seem like such a great thing when you first implement them. But after a while you always run into the things the author describes. There are simply no options out there that can compete with a simple CMS that you build from scratch. Keep it simple, as in, a few textareas that accept HTML and spit it out verbatim. Deal with all the SEO bits such as good urls, meta descriptions, etc. so that it works in the correct way. Incorporate it into your actual site shell, as opposed to trying to create a fragile little WordPress theme that sorta looks like your site. Make it modular enough that you can drop it into every new project you do from here on out. It'll take you two days to do this. If it takes longer, you're overengineering. Stop and redesign from scratch for the whole thing to live in two tables with a half dozen fields each. You don't need a little tree structure where you can drag nodes around, jQuery style. You just need a table full of content and a way to display it. From there, it's maybe a few hours per existing site to rip out the garbage CMS you're currently using and retrofit yours in its place. You'll never look back.

smiler 16y ago

Surely there must be a product out there which allows you to have complete control over every aspect of the templates, the HTML and the CSS. Anyone got any suggestions?

jasonkester 16y ago
PHP, Rails, Django and ASP.NET come to mind. Anything more specialized tends to cater towards letting content owners edit things, which necessarilly puts "Rich Editor" on the feature list, which in every case makes it useless for developers.
shib71 16y ago
I work on one which gives developers total control of front-end views, and is mainly intended to make it easier to develop new models/behaviour, and add administration UI. But it gets dismissed because of the server-side language (Coldfusion). The framework/CMS is FarCry (http://www.farcrycore.org/ http://www.farcrycore.org/).

pan69 16y ago

Simply don't use some prefab CMS. The reason there are about a gazillion CMS's out there is because it's really easy to write one, opposed to e.g. writing a really good search engine, which is difficult and there is only one of those. Use a good web application framework and separate your front facing site from your content management system.

DjDarkman 16y ago

I code a custom CMS when I can't find a CMS that does 99% of my required features out of the box. Otherwise it's simply not worth my time. A CMS is lost if tries to dictate the HTML output, sadly most of them do. My best bet is to use frameworks/libraries to achieve the needed features. I look at his as a Lego building project.