Nithin Meppurathu

A CMS? A custom CMS? I just need a website.

So what is a CMS? CMS stands for content management system. When thinking about creating a website, choosing a CMS is very important. Not everyone is a software engineer and knows how to code up websites. There are a lot of tools on the internet which engineers have built to allow users to write information, this information is then turned into “website code” and then a website is created from that generated code. This tool is referred to as the CMS.

There are a lot of prebuilt CMS solutions out there, or you can have an engineer build you a custom CMS, molded to fit your needs. This is a very hard decision to make, choosing between a custom and prebuilt CMS. This decision should be made with the sole purpose for creating your website. If your going to choose a prebuilt CMS you need to fit into the following buckets.

1. Content (Blogs, News, Text based data)

2. E-commerce (Online stores, Auctions)

3. A little bit of both of the above with slight more flexibility.

Highlight’s of a CMS: Efficiency, Community, Upkeep

Some Popular CMS solutions for your bucket:

( Note that these suggestion are all written in PHP, a popular server programming language, which is one of the most commonly used in the world next to java)

If your in the Content bucket, then you’ll fit perfectly into Wordpress. Wordpress is a out of the box solution, that is free to download and install on top which ever server you will be hosting your website from. Wordpress usually comes with free out of the box themes and you can be up and running within seconds. Most of the time these themes are not as great so you might end up either paying for a theme or have a engineer develop a custom one for you. Wordpress is the most commonly used CMS in the world. If you can use Microsoft word, you will be able to use Wordpress. The learning curve is very small for Wordpress and it contributes to the reason why its at the top spot.

If you’re in the E-commerce bucket, then you’ll fit perfectly with Magento. Magento offers great tools for managing your products and your inventory. It is the best tool on the market for managing an online store. But most of the time, just managing a store isn’t enough, you need to be able to manage content and build custom features on top of the way the store works.

If your in the third bucket, you’ll fit perfectly with Expression Engine. Expression engine is a paid CMS. Expression engine comes with both content and e-commerce solution plugins bundled in. With a prebuilt CMS you are bound to what the CMS does. Most of the time it is very hard for developers to build on top of these products. Most state of the art CMS solution like the ones above, give a feature called (plugins) this allows for the community members to build extensions to the CMS to added additional functionality. This additional function however is still limited to the general audience and might not have every feature you wish to have.

Prebuilt CMS are usually “open source”, which basically means the code to make the CMS is released to the public, this allows for the community of developers to upgrade and built better feature and keep improving and building on top of the CMS.

So wow, you might be saying, why would I ever need a Custom CMS if there are already so many solution for my needs already made. Most of the time that’s all you need is a prebuilt CMS. All of the CMS solutions one can have an engineer try to build on top of, but because they where initially made for the “general” audience, most of the time the plugins is not as efficient or as custom as it could have been.

Custom CMS solution’s is for project out of the box that doesn’t really fit into the general use case of a prebuilt CMS. A custom CMS is used when one wants his/her website to be very defined to their organization. It is created for just what you need and not built with a million and one features. 

With a custom CMS, it is usually mush more expensive than a prebuilt solution. Also because there isn’t a community for a custom CMS like a prebuilt, a lot for the feature cant simply just be added within seconds like a prebuilt CMS. Also because of this your CMS is not open source you have no community updating your CMS feature sets like a prebuilt CMS.

Most of the top fortune 500 companies use a custom CMS, they don’t want to “look like the rest”. Custom CMS allows for “custom” feature sets, defined to your needs. If you not in the top buckets, you cant use a prebuilt CMS. Your needs at that point are far greater.

So to paint a clear picture, lets use two use case study members and see why prebuilt or custom was their pick.

User 1 - John:

John is a well-established writer. He needs a website to be able to share his thoughts about his books and reach out to his readers and hear what they have to say.

John best bet, based on our buckets would be Wordpress. John pays an engineer for a custom designed and implements the site. He creates a blog and start receiving comments from his readers. John saved a lot of time and money and was up in about a week with everything he wanted to do online.

User 2 - Sara:

Sara is also a brand new writer. She needs a website like john to be able to share her thoughts about her book and reach out to her audience. Sara is a little bit more tech savvy than john and started creating digital eBooks which she wants to sell online and also allow her users to download right from her website. Sara also decides to use Wordpress. Sara pays johns designer friend to create her website and her website gets created within 2 weeks. Sara website however doesn’t have an online store yet and no downloadable feature. Sara decided to look for any community plugins to accomplish this with Wordpress. She finds a plugin to create a online store, it doesn’t look the way she wants it, and doesn’t function the exact way she intended. This custom secure downloadable book that allows for security locking on any file she uploads doesn’t have a plugin, she has to think about getting a engineer to build that custom, so she contacts a engineer and the engineer wont be able to build this because of the way files are stored in the Wordpress database the way she intended to have done. If this were a custom CMS project, this feature would have been built without any issues.

Usually speed and optimization is a huge factor when considering a custom solutions. Most wordpress sites reply heavily and alternative-caching mechanism to speed up website because of the amount of feature sets it needed to have to handle “every general situation”.

As stated above, the decision between choosing custom CMS and prebuilt CMS is really based on your website needs.