2011-03-29 00:43:11.063246+00 by meuon 7 comments
I've been watching Nancy wrangle Joomla, and I even took a swing a Drupal for a while. ALL CMS's suck, even ones you build yourself. They abstract out and hide things that should be easy things to change. But at least, when you build your own, you know where things are hidden. HTML, CSS and JavaScript are already abstract enough that they don't need another level of abstraction added.
[ related topics: Content Management ]
comments in descending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2011-03-30 01:21:39.082414+00 by: mkelley
As someone who works on CMSs all.friggin.day. Let me say that Drupal/WordPress and similar items are not true CMSs. They're blog management systems. Sure you can hack them to manage content, but that's not what they're good at. Of course, if you want a good CMS, you're gonna to look at spending money because the open source stuff isn't there yet...and I've looked.
#Comment Re: made: 2011-03-29 18:40:55.500557+00 by: Larry Burton
Of course there are times I wonder exactly why I moved away from Blosxom.
#Comment Re: made: 2011-03-29 17:14:41.176311+00 by: ebradway
I've developed the habit of just using Blogger and Google Sites. I can actually duplicate my wife's site on Google Sites except for the darned favicon.ico. For some reason, Google broke the ability to change it when they swallowed JotSpot. But it looks like it's fixed now. Maybe I can move Asha's site over to Google.
#Comment Re: made: 2011-03-29 16:59:22.826389+00 by: Mars Saxman
I've written a couple of CMSes from scratch, and no, there's nothing hard about it, but it's also kind of boring to rewrite the same set of database transactions over and over again. These days I'd rather just throw a copy of WordPress at the site, tweak some stock theme until it looks reasonably similar to what I had in mind, and then live with the handful of ways it's not exactly perfect. Still a worthwhile bargain, since I get the site running in an hour or so instead of a full weekend.
#Comment Re: made: 2011-03-29 12:47:57.657183+00 by: Larry Burton
I've been using WordPress for a number of years now and the only real problems I've had with it were things breaking on version upgrades. Some of the themes I found to be way too complicated and easily broken but there have always been themes I've been able to easily understand and edit to achieve the result I was looking for.
#Comment Re: made: 2011-03-29 02:42:01.690881+00 by: ebradway
I think the problem is that you want Joomla or Drupal to work like something you made yourself. Rather, you should look at what it can do and see if it fits the bill. The idea is not to have to make it yourself so you can focus on the content.
That said, I haven't upgraded Asha's Drupal-based site in far too long because I had to hack the PHP code to get it to let me center the banner on the page.
What I'd really like is a simple system that lets me edit a web page by clicking a link on the page and manages menus.
#Comment Re: made: 2011-03-29 01:10:19.752743+00 by: Dan Lyke
Yeah, I've looked at WordPress and Joomla and Drupal and I always end up back with "this isn't doing anything terribly complex, and I can't figure out where the hell it's generating that bad piece of HTML!".
There are a number of things wrong with the Flutterby CMS, that I mean to fix some day, and I've also got a few choice words for MediaWiki, but when people approach me about web development these days I'm throwing my hands up and running away because if it were worth my time to do I'd do it from scratch, and it's going to be a flat out nightmare if they continue down the CMS path.
But that's also headed down another set of musings that it's taken me too long to come to, about people like you and me vs how the common folk approach the world...