“RE: Ugly Secrets of Content Management Systems”

On Thursday, July 13, 2000 at 6:26 PM, Alex Moffat (alexmoffat@yahoo.com) wrote:

>I think the wheel analogy is interesting but can also be looked at another
>way.
>
>If you want a standard car to drive to the grocery store then you go to a
>lot and you buy one. If you want to win a race you will at least replace
>some of the standard parts with others, if not build the whole thing.
>Notice that there is a continuum here from, for example, adding things to
>the standard engine, through replacing with another enigne from another
>manufacturer, to building a custom engine yourself.
>
>This is the way I would like CMS to work, each would be a semi custom
>solution built from standard components. Yes, no one builds a wheel from
>scratch (unless for cycling :) anymore, but people do like to be able to
>replace their current wheels with differnt wheels from other manufactures
>when they need to or want to.
>
>If you want a standard web site then buy a system and make you site work
>the way the system supports most easily.
>
>If you want your site to work in a particular way, and you can't find a
>system that supports that out of the box, then build your own system from
>standard components.

Alex,

I agree with everything you've said except for one point: you're not really stating the other side of the "wheel" argument! :-) The point was that you can get most of what you need from the off-the-shelf packages, and then build the other 10% - 20% yourself, which is far easier and less expensive than building the first 80% - 90%. (If this all works out the way we hope it will, those other parts that you need will be available from other vendors, so you might just swap parts instead of building anything at all.)

Those companies that feel the need to build their own system entirely from scratch, right down to the lowest level of the code, are usually making a mistake IMO. More often than not, I think they do that out of frustration because the "big guys" (Vignette, etc) aren't meeting their needs and are very hard to customize... and if the "big guys" aren't meeting their needs, how can they expect some small-fry like Manila, Zope, or Conversant to do the trick?

What they don't realize is that (to varying degrees) all three systems were built with extensibility and customization in mind.

Speaking from Conversant's perspective (which is my job <ahem>), customization was one of our main goals when designing the entire system, and we *know* that it could be the heart of virtually any groupware product, including a super-CMS for a very busy site, a group calendar app for a multi-national corporation, or a project manager and customer-relationship-management-system for someone else. So, getting back to your analogy: if something in Conversant doesn't work the way you want it to, replace it with something that does. You can have that semi-custom (or fully-custom) solution that IS built with standard parts, all built to a wonderful API (Covnersant's heart of Gold).

Seth

Seth Dillingham                                       seth@macrobyte.net
President, Macrobyte Resources                            (860) 572-0244
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