Quote:
Originally Posted by PBucksJohn
You're going to get less and pay much more in the long run going the custom route.
You have to hope that the person who wrote it doesn't disappear and is available long term to make modifications, fixes, feature additions, and provide general support for the product. The last thing you want to do to a programmer is hand them someone else's code to work on. They hate it  Either way this will get costly after a while.
Also, you have more issues to worry about as security goes with one person using the solution as opposed to many people using the solution.
With CARMA you are not stuck to a certain flow which does happen with some solutions as was indicated above. |
When you go custom you have the source code so you can always hire someone else. You have the source code. Omar from Sitedepth will sell the code and is generally very responsive to.
As far as a programmer picking it up and it being a problem, that's why you hire good programmers. A good programmer will use standards and commonly agreed upon conventions. I try to adopt MVC and Ruby on Rails conventions as much as possible, even in my PHP code. The advantage being it is extremely easy for another programmer to understand and pick up. What programmers hate is having tables nested 10 levels deep with malformed HTML with no comments from a coder oversees that has only been programming for a few years. Using descriptive variable names also helps.
Having built numerous CMS solutions I learn from each one and they get better and better with each iteration. The code gets leaner and leaner, and easier and easier to maintain.
With a custom solution you can design your own workflow. I've used products out there where it was such a pain in the ass to use their interface I looked at the database and updated it directly. If it is set up exactly how you need, then you're going to get your job done a lot easier in a lot less time. Time is money. If you have to spend 2x more time maintaining your site, then you're getting paid half as much for your work.