I was trying to analyze the trend about companies leaving their own custom built solution in favor of the standard CMS solutions such as Drupal, Joomla and DotNetNuke etc. While I can find many stories about medium and large organizations leaving their custom solution for Drupal/Joomla etc, I cannot find any reference where organizations are leaving prebuilt CMS's/Frameworks to go custom again. Is this not happening at all or it's just a matter of not being properly documented?
Thank you.
Imran.
I can't think of a situation where a company has abandoned an in-house developed CMS in favor of re-developing a CMS on their own.
Everything I'm familiar with involves leaving a hand rolled CMS solution in favor of a commercial/open source solution.
Well i can imagine that while most companies prefer homebrewn solutions for some of them or in certain scenario's an open source or commercial alternative might fill their needs.
In case we at our work need to set up a blog we'll most likely choose wordpress, we know it, it does what it needs to do and does it good. Customization isn't a big deal but out of the box it works too.
For larger projects we always use our own CSM built with our own framework, that is what we know best.
So to answer your question, I still have to see the first company going from existing CMS to custom built but i'm fairly certain there are alot doing both.
Looking at it just from an engineering standpoint -- a commercial CMS company, with 50 full time engineers, puts in about 100k hours of engineering effort annually into managing and developing products. A homegrown solution typically has a small team of engineers assigned to manage and develop it, often also balancing other projects & responsibilities. Let's say the homegrown solution has a team of 4 people, working part time (20 hours) a week, which is about 4k hours annually into managing and developing the product.
That's 100k vs 4k hours of engineering in 1 year.
Also consider, for the homegrown solution, most of the first year's 4k hours will be spent recreating basic content management that has been written 100 times over, e.g. permissioning, workflow, approval processes, etc.
From a business standpoint, businesses want to focus on their core competencies. Unless your core competency is content management, makes no sense to build a homegrown CMS from scratch, and companies largely are not doing this, or moving away from them if they have in the past.
Related
Background
We are a B2B company with no in-house developers. We're current outsourcing all our development work to a small software company. They've built their own custom CMS, which we are using.
At the moment, we're in a redesign phase where a new website is being build by this same software company, again tailored to work with their custom build CMS.
At the same time, we are planning to have a webshop, which is going to be built by a different company, a big E-Commerce software company.
What we need
In the end it should be one website, on the same domain. Where content and commerce should go hand in hand. Everything should be seamlessly integrated with each other, for example the search function (they both offer their own search engine), content and products.
Wouldn't it make more sense to let one company build everything instead of two different companies? What are plus or downsides to work with one or two companies in this case? Where could it go wrong?
I'm a bit scared when we work with two partners, that the total cost of ownership is going to rise to the moon. That it will bring a lot of inefficiencies with it and we're hindered when it comes to further scaling.
P.S. I'm not a final decision maker within this company, but I'm looking for input in order to change the current plan (which is working with two partners).
An interesting scenario that you are in here.
Wouldn't it make more sense to let one company build everything instead of two different companies?
Based on your description there is nothing in this that is particularly out of the ordinary. A website for your company with an online shop. There is no good reason why you need two contractors. What I mean here, is that there is no reason why one company cannot provide the expertise to deliver both parts. Adding a second company / contractor will add more complexity to the situation and therefore breaks the generally good rule of keep it simple. (More on this later).
What are plus or downsides to work with one or two companies in this case?
The positive of working with two companies is that you can get experts in the different areas. For example if company A is an expert in one part of the solution and company B is an expert in another you get the combined expertise. However, in this case there doesn't seem to be a need for this.
Where could it go wrong?
This is very much the downside of having two companies working on this. The two companies will need to work together to provide the solution. This is likely to require some management from you (or your company) which you correctly identify the cost of ownership can significantly increase. You run the risk of both of your contractors pointing the finger at each other when things go wrong.
I would strongly recommend at least considering using a single company for the whole project delivering a combined website and online shop.
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First off please have patience for this long winded post. I wanted to get all the pertinent information (as I see it) out to you.
I have a decision to make and would like your input. I have recently taken on the task of taking over my daughter's skating club's website. They have a custom site written in asp pages and don't have anyone to support it. I want to move their site to a CMS system so it doesn't take a developer to maintain or make changes to it. We also want to add some custom pieces to it like a registration form for the club and some other custom pieces around marking down scores and viewing stats and such.
I am a .Net developer and have been developing in SharePoint for some time, but don't feel that SharePoint is a very good fit for them. Our current web host is GoDaddy. I don't yet have the details of the contract with them yet so can't comment on the service we have with them.
I have been looking at three CMS's at the moment. DotNetNuke, Umbraco, and Orchard. All are good and all have pros and cons as far as I can see. I am currently leaning towards DotNetNuke for the following reasons:
Umbraco appears to be a "create from scratch" system with no templates to apply (I apologize if this is incorrect, but it is based on the information I received). I am not a guy to develop the visual aspects of a site, so would rely heavily on templates and such.
Orchard sounds like it might be a good fit, however I have never developed in MVC before. Most of my .NET has been straight ASPX. I am not opposed to learning MVC and have had it on my list for a while, but I don't know if I have the time to learn and port over the current site.
Orchard also appears to be a bit heavy for a normal user (explaining content types and such). I want something others can take up when I pass on the responsibility.
So I am wondering what you all think. Even with learning MVC would Orchard be the best platform for us based on the information I have provided? Should I stay with DotNetNuke as my choice? I would like to mention that I did consider Sitefinity and would have had it at the top of my list, except we are a non-profit and don't necassarily have the budget for a paid CMS.
Thanks again and I look forward to your thoughts.
Well, the ultimate choice will vary on your business need. They all do the same thing, but how they achieve the goal is quite different.
Umbraco - It utilizes the Model, View, Controller (MVC) methodology. This obviously presents an assortment of benefits. However, the methodology to build a product can be quite extensive and even the layout to modify data can be quite cumbersome.
DotNetNuke - Uses a more familiar technology, Web-Forms. This has an assortment of benefits that go a long with it. Including a market, documentation, permission, and ease.
I've never used Orchard so I can't comment- but I can comment on the other two. To show you how I came to my conclusion to use which Content Management System hopefully it will point you in the best direction.
My project that I worked on required a lot of non-technical people to utilize our new product. It has a lot of functionality and features that were required; the biggest however was ensuring the following:
Ease
Intuitive
Control
Speed
Those were our four primary categories. I'll attempt to outline what each area means-
One of the largest pitfall of a Content Management System is that they tend to do more then you require. So the question becomes which product will bend while maintaining my core goals be. For that reason our company chose DotNetNuke because by nature DotNetNuke isn't a Content Management System it is a very powerful Framework.
What this particular product does is focus on a lot of key aspects so a developer doesn't have to waste a lot of time in maintaining but rather in developing.
Ease - A non-technical user is able to view a page; then edit the content in place on that page. Which allows you to incorporate a What you see, is what you get mentality. For the non-developer they get the all familiar Email or Word Editor.
Intuitive - In DotNetNuke 7 they've modified the menu structure for editing. You can actually disable other users to make it actually show less, do less, and still maintain the highest level of control. The user won't get lost in editing the page.
Control - Now this is what is nice, you can regulate each and every control for your user. So you can allow certain content to be regulated and other data not to be.
Speed - It has a market, so you can implement other developer modules. But it also includes a lot of documentation- it may appear cumbersome at first but is quite easy to pick up. Which makes the initial start time relatively painless.
But what do all of those mean to you?
Simple, it means you can develop a beautiful elegant page quite quickly. But since you can restrict several tiers of access you can ensure the page content can be edited by someone other then you- But it won't jeopardize any of your development / content. As you control whom and what is modified.
If your familiar with Microsoft .Net then it will be quite easy to learn; I'm sure other products can accomplish those same goals. But DotNetNuke did it easier which met our goals. It allowed us to not worry about excessive issues or support to enter our company; as the user understood it in such a way that issues don't arise.
That is why we chose DotNetNuke it will boil down to your preference. My experience with the product, community, and marketplace have made me love this product and not chose another. As I can leverage the Core API when needed; so Development, Maintenance, Administration became a breeze for whatever my imagination may produce. But should a developer ever not be present the site and it's quality will not hinder when I leave.
There is a selection of starter kits available in the package repository on the community website and also a few of them can be applied directly during installation of Umbraco. Also in the package repository you will find a wide selection of other packages which you can use on your site to enhance and add additional functionality.
It is true that Umbraco does not come pre-installed with "themes" as such like some other CMS's but this is the beauty of Umbraco, you have a clean slate to work from if you choose. It enforces no requirements on your markup or styling so there is absolutely nothing to stop you using a free or purchased template from any one of the template libraries online such as Creative Market, Template Monster etc etc.
Umbraco has an incredibly friendly, helpful and active community on both the forums and Twitter.
I work with all three and would tell you to use DotNetNuke over the other 2. The primary reason is that if you are developer, Orchard and Umbraco are fine... but you may or may not be the final or future content manager in the future of the club and want to be able to hand the site off to someone. DotNetNuke has the larger community and would be easier for the future admins to learn as well as get support for.
DNN will give you the development options you want, but give the content editors the easier system to work work... and keep you from having to support the site if you ever move on.
don't forget that Sitefinity does have a free community edition: http://www.sitefinity.com/try-now/free-asp-net-cms
it does have limitations, but for simple sites like this it might be just what you need, plus if they ever get a budget someday they could upgrade to the Small Business Edition by just buying a license and get more features and less limitations on the content and page limits.
worth a look.
otherwise, in my opinion your choice depends on who is going to be maintaining the site. If that is you and you'll always be in charge, pick whatever platform works best for you as a developer.
If on the other hand you have to make it drop-dead easy, pick the platform that is best for end users, that based on your knowledge of the user, would require the least amount of training (Sitefinity CE has my vote on that one!)
I hope this is helpful!
I would highly recommend going with DotNetNuke for the sheer reason that the community and available modules for the platform far surpasses any of the other options.
If you want to do MVC style development, you can with DNN using the WebAPI approach for services, but if you don't want to, you can skip that altogether.
The amount of Free and Paid extensions for DNN grows on a daily basis, available in the Store or Forge. You can also search both of these locations right from within the product itself.
Increasingly, I have noticed the number of Content Management Systems in use. I have some familiarity with SiteCore. I have read some literature on Umbraco. I only just got wind of Orchard the other day. I have only heard positive feedback about EPiServer. I am soon to move into a role that uses it.
Do these differ vastly in features and price? What has led you to choose one (or several) over the others?
EDIT
I did a brief review of so-called free CMSs here: On Free Microsoft Compatible Content Management Systems
Reasons I ditched Orchard when developing a 50k page website:
The Orchard CMS import tool is simply too slow. It would only accept
small batches at a time. Initially, it took eight minutes to import
1000 records. So, working on that principle I expected that it could
take seven hours to import all the records. Unfortunately, I started
to receive performance issues as more records were inserted into the
database. I even started to reduce the batch size, which helped only
temporarily in the early stages. (See Saying no to Orchard)
I can only comment mainly on Sitecore and a bit on Umbraco from my knowledge of others using it:
Sitecore is an enterprise level web CMS with an "enterprise price tag." It's very extensible, has a lot of developer/community support, and is very developer friendly. The structure of content is based on a tree of nodes with parent-children relationships. Sitecore is well known in the WCM community as a leader in content management and is rated very well by companies sch as Forrester Research, etc.
Based on my previous research and conversations with friends, Umbraco is very similar to Sitecore. It has a lower price compared to Sitecore but its not a complete rip off. Umbraco is also built on ASP.NET like Sitecore.
Here's a three-part series on Sitecore vs. Umbraco from a developer.
Of the ones you mention above, I have only used Umbraco and Sitecore to build with and am certified in both. I like the way they allow me to build systems that really work well for my customers. They both have a feel that they simply give you building blocks to create your masterpiece instead of "modules" of functionality plugged in that give you a blog, forum, etc. They make it really easy to share content throughout the site and create really nice admin experiences.
Umbraco's community is really great. They both struggle a little on the documentation side IMO, but Umbraco's videos really help and the community is quick to help. Also, if you're talking cost then its free (Umbraco) vs. quite expensive (Sitecore).
But the reality is that each developer has their own taste and the style of CMS they like to work with. Ultimately, its the team that has to build the site that really matters most when it comes to how each CMS performs for the end user.
In addition to the links above, here are a couple blog posts that may help you get a feel for the different systems:
Orchard & Umbraco - Introduction (part 1 of 4) - Aaron Powell
Sitecore vs. Umbraco Terminology
Good luck!
I mostly work with EPiServer and Sitecore, and I can tell you the difference in short:
Sitecore has broader architecture and more powerfull UI. CMS is deeply configurable and highly extensible, it has clever publishing and caching system, powerful search and page editor. But it doesn't provide much out of box and UI is pretty old, slow and hard to learn. So this will be a long journey until you understand it good and make a good support of all its features for editors.
EPiServer is easy, friendly to users and developers. It provides an essential bunch of features out of box, has easy UI and page editor, good drag-and-drop experience, easy personalization. It is code-first, distributed with NuGet, provides dependency injection for its services, out of box MVC support. But it's not so extensible and configurable, has pure search (without expensive EPiFind module) and generally lower-featured comparing to Sitecore. So it's good for small/middle websites, but can be an obstacle in complex solutions.
Both have similar tree-item concept, rich documentation, pure public module system and hard UI customization. Both expensive and not open source.
As I know, Umbraco is pretty similar to EPiServer and Sitecore, but free and open source. Of course you get less features, more bugs, not much docs and no free support.
Orchard is really different comparing to other three CMS. It is module-based like Wordpress: you use standard or public modules and themes, instead of writing the whole website from scratch. You create your own themes and modules to customize the website and CMS. So entire CMS is highly extensible and provides a lot of free community modules. But in the same time you lose control and learning curve is much longer. Orchard is free and open-source, entirely MVC-based, UI and API are well done, but it can be hard for both developers and editors to understand it.
Wordpress vs Episerver:
http://tedgustaf.com/blog/2011/2/comparison-of-episerver-and-wordpress/
OK so the guy who wrote that is an Episerver consultant but it's interesting and balanced.
All the different web content management systems have different strengths. So which one is best for you depends a lot on what kind of sites you create, what kind of budget you have and what you think matters the most in a CMS.
For example, Orchard and SiteCore are VERY different systems.
I'm a bit biased as I work there, but I believe that Webnodes CMS have several important advantages over the systems you mention.
Keywords: Relations between content, actual classes for the different content types, custom LINQ provider for all data access, expose all content as an OData endpoint etc.
Microsoft used our CMS to demonstrate OData at Mix11. Video from Mix 11
At this point we are developing Sitecore websites and we are gaining experience every day. This means that we know how to adjust our approach to different types of customers and that we are able to build our applications quicker every project we do. Of course Sitecore is not the only W-CMS around and we have looked into other W-CMS's.
What are the pro's and the con's for a company to offer solutions in different types of CMS's and what would this mean for the programmers that are working with this CMS?
Would a choice to offer solutions in more CMS's automatically mean that the global experience per CMS will shrink relative?
Hope there are some people around with experience in multiple big W-CMS's (Sitecore, KEntico, EPIServer, etc.. etc..).
If you truly enjoy working with Sitecore than maybe consider Umbraco. Umbraco is very similar to Sitecore and cheaper (I believe former Sitecore employees may even work there). It might be nice to offer a high-priced CMS (SC) and a less expensive alternative also built on .NET (Umbraco). I would say don't try to support tons of CMS's since there are so many. Keep a focus on a select few. Maybe consider selecting others based on the market for them and how their partner programs work (i.e. like Sitecore will recommend you as a solution partner and help you with sales).
Are you prepared to keep your programmers skills on top of each of the different CMS solutions you'd offer? That can be a high cost if you offer a number of different solutions based on different platforms,e.g. if you have programmers that have to know C#, Java and PHP because in this is what the various CMS support development be done. Thus, you may want to stick to .Net CMS rather than go venturing too far into a different stack as that can carry the challenge of maintaining skills.
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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" (c)
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.
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.
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.
First, to address your build or "buy" questions - you would be crazy to build. The resourced needed to support code you write as it changes to meet each clients needs will end up costing you a fortune in the long run. It's hard to beat the resources of thousands of developers that many of the big projects have. Does your firm have a security specialist? How about a QA team that constantly searches for ans squashes bugs? Unless you are trying to do a one off, highly specialized application, pick a CMS and go with it.
Next, as far as being able to implement the CMS across many types of sites, that is entirely dependent on your firms developers. If your developer knows XYZ CMS, then he should be able to take any design and make it work for the CMS. Any good CMS has the design layer completely separated from the content and code so the design should not be limited by the CMS in any way. It's just a matter of learning the particular templating system employed by the CMS of your choice.
Last, I am surprised that no one has mentioned the solution to your wanting to limit the amount of control your clients have over their sites. As mentioned you can go the SaaS route and never give the client access to the administrative back end of the site. Any of the good CMS projects offer front end editing. This will allow your client to add/remove/edit the content on the site without giving them access to anything structure or design related. You can completely control the admin, layout, and functionality while the client simply controls the content only, which seems like what you are trying to accomplish.
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.
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.
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 : 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 : Same as above - language = Python
EZPublish for large organisations but not as advanced as Liferay - language = PHP
Joomla and drupal for normal websites.
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.
I cant think of an open source CMS that doesn't provide everything that most companies would need.
you get the benefits of bug fixes, little deployment time and ease of documentation.
When selecting the CMS try to use one that is not too bulky or not too popular.
most CMS allow for easy expansion so if a client has special needs then its easy to add functionality.
A reason that you start to build you're CMS could be because the landscape of CMS systems is big (and you can't make up your mind on one system to put in all you're energy).
Do you want a simple CMS for a website, an integrations framework or personalization / social media.
As there are a lot of OS CMS out there, I wouldn't recommend you to start from scratch. Check for research EG:
http://www.slideshare.net/OpenSourceCMS/451-group-future-of-web-content-management-open-source-cms
Also check the OS license of products and how this could affect your projects.
Good luck!
Lots of good responses already, but I don't see anyone talking about the real users, the customer who is paying for this site.
One reason a CMS product is often better is that it can give you a lot of help material, usability refinements and add-ons that you won't get when you build it yourself. More importantly for the end-users, it can mean they extend and add to the site without needing to get IT to give them permission (and the run-around on budget/resources) to do so.
Another issue is that if you build it yourself, then that is the only copy of that software that is being security tested and probed. A product will have been through more penetration tests and probing.
On the other hand there are a wealth of CMS' out there and it can be confusing if you do not know what you want. The CMS Matrix is a good site for comparing all sorts of CMS' to find one that suits your needs.
I work for a CMS vendor, Elcom Technology, so I am slightly biased - but I have also used WordPress, SharePoint, DotNetNuke, Joomla and Drupal to various levels of degree and they all offer a big step up over something home-built.
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.