Net Success
Can My Web Site Benefit from a Custom CMS?
When it comes time to upgrade the company website, the decision must be made of how the content will be managed. On a shoestring budget, many a business owner has realized the disasters of the do-it-yourself method. After hours of frustration with HTML tags and CSS tutorials, many businesses depend on their web designer to handle the site updates.
But what if the site requires regular updates, or the site needs to be expanded over time? Thus enters the CMS (Content Management System). A CMS is a web application that allows someone who has limited or no knowledge of web design or development to change or add text, images, and other content of a web site without having to deal with the technical side of things.
Having an updatable website can offer quite a few advantages in today’s markets. New product information or special promotions can provide a competitive advantage to a company. In addition, up-to-date and relevant information can attract coveted traffic to a site.
A number of prepackaged CMS suites are available and have become increasingly popular. Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal are some of the most popular examples of open-source content management systems. These tools can make great one-size-fits-all solutions, but can also present problems for the company who has specific needs. Adapting your existing branding or design to one of these systems, or customizing the system after the fact, can sometimes require quite a bit of development work. There can be a bit of a learning curve for those who are new to these applications.
Another big concern with open-source tools is the site’s security. Since the code is available for anyone to experiment with, the site will become vulnerable to attacks by any savvy hacker that discovers the site is powered by a familiar CMS, and bugs on other sites can reveal potential weaknesses on yours.
In many cases, the best way to go is a customized solution. A good web development agency will be able to assess what is required and come up with a solution that will be both easy to use and powerful enough to give the web site owner the control of the site and security level that he or she needs. Agencies like NetSuccess specialize in this type of development and problem solving. After all, as your business and marketing strategy evolve, so should your web site!
Two quick comments:
1. As it relates to security, several of the open source CMS packages have done a tremendous job of ensuring that security is a top priority and that the holes are minimal at best. When security issues are discovered they are more likely to do with browsers and servers than they are with the CMS - so all CMS apps (custom, open source or otherwise) will need to overcome those issues.
2. You might want to look at Modx (http://www.modxcms.com). It’s a PHP open source CMS. It extremely easy for end-users and extremely customizable and extensible so designers and developers can create anything they want. Let me know if you want some URLs of sites built on Modx.
Thanks for reading, and taking the time to comment, Tom!
As to the security issues, I think Jonathan is talking more about the prevalence of certain CMS suites allowing them to be “gamed” en masse. For example, any exploit found in an installation of modx can be used on any of the thousands of sites that employ it, provided they are using the same version. A custom CMS such as NetSuccess’s Advocate is created and configured differently for each client, so in most cases, the same flaw could not be exploited across two installations.
As far as Modx itself, our issues with using it are that most of our end-users in charge of content are not technically trained to handle the full functionality of modx, and as such most of the functionality only provides further confusion to them. Our clients now want a lot of custom social networking capability, such as integrated blogs, forums, and shopping carts, and as Justin James says from his Tech Republic article, (http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6125372.html) “If you’re looking to put together a site that is nearly 100 percent content–and you don’t want to have to maintain the menus, navigation, META tag data, files, and so forth, MODx is a great fit. If your site requires more user interactivity, such as forums, shopping carts, and social networking, MODx will not give you what you are looking for.”
Nathan, good points, but a bit out dated. I understand your point about the security issues. If a security issue existed in Modx and someone exploited that issue and they happened to find other sites on Modx before the security hole was patched then are definitely more vulnerable than a custom solution such as you are offering. I have yet to encounter an issue, but it’s always possible.
The article you referenced was from 2006 shortly after Modx was first introduced. A lot has changed since 2006 as I’m sure your own CMS has changed a lot since then as well. Modx will support any of the above functionality though the e-commerce does require more customization than the others. Blogs, forums, custom meta tags and lots more are easily made available in Modx now.
That said, you guys obviously have a great product as well. I have not had the privilege of seeing it first hand, but I’m sure it more than covers all of your clients’ needs. I’ll have to come over some time so I can see it up close.
Hey Tom,
Our problem has never really been with ModX, and of all the open-source CMS installations I’ve worked with, ModX is the best. The issue is more fitting the needs of our client with the what their CMS delivers, and developing a custom one is only one of many solutions. The aim of this article wasn’t to discredit open-source (and if you check out some of our other blogs, NetSuccess supports the open-source LAMP environment and all of the resources that it brings with it), it was to point out one valid solution we provide.
To be honest, I haven’t worked with ModX since last year, but the learning curve was several levels of magnitude higher than our clients could understand; as most of them were not IT specialists or web developers but someone from inside the office (usually some kind of marketing or sales operative) that used the site exclusively to update content. Thus, Advocate helps us to provide a rough framework that has a modular capability, as opposed to an extra-functional framework that we’d have to slim down to fit our clients’ needs and skillset.