Custom CMS or Open Source?
 

What do you think?

For a non-adult website would you come with a custom CMS developed by a programmer/developer?

Or a Customized WP/Joomla/Drupal etc?

What do you think?

You might as well ask "what's better, a Lamborghini Testarossa or a Prius?"

Each one has its advantages and disadvantages. It all depends on what you want, what you need and what you can afford.

What's the purpose of the site? What's the budget? Who will be doing the upkeep, a Master of Code or a barely computer-literate client?

In my opinion you first need to narrow those down before being able to make a decision.

Sure i agree with you.

I am just looking for a general feedback.

I've coded CMS products for many companies here, as well as a number of mainstream clients. From this experience, I can tell you this: the features these clients requested were often critical differentiators in their businesses. Standing out from the pack is so critical in today's market, that it almost trumps the time-to-market advantage of off-the-shelf products.

depends on what your needs are, what type of site.

:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup

100% agree with this .. with one caveat ...

In the current market this, IMO would not apply to paysites.

But for his non adult project or even for some creative "new" adult project... absolutely agree.

Client: I'm selling personalized cat hats. I want a site which allows users to use their cellphones as well as their desktops to input the personalized name/message that will go on the cat's hat they design inside the virtual design studio I want the site to have.

Later on I will want to expand to dog hats and the emerging pet hedgehog markets so the site needs to allow for that.

I'll be up-keeping the site myself so it has to have a WYSWYG interface for the back-end which is very simple because using email gives me a headache.

And my budget is 300 dollars.

:1orglaugh

I agree that having a custom-programmed site is ideal just like most everyone would love to have a Lamborghini Testarossa.

That does not mean it's a realistic solution to a particular client's needs or budget :2 cents:

Depends on the type of site and what your needs are. Also consider what your budget is and what a reasonable development timeframe is if you can afford to hire coding staff and wait while they build a custom system.

Good luck with the project. :thumbsup

Can't edit my previous post but I wanted to play Devil's advocate to my own argument.

Client: I'm the most successful car dealer in my area and need a website. I want my customers to be able to choose options for a car online (insurance, extras, color) and to send me questions or comments as well as rate the salesman that served them.

I want my salespeople to be able to use the site for after-sales care and on-the-road sales so it needs to be mobile-enabled. My budget is large because my business is very competitive and being online is vital.

You'll also need to up-keep the site because it needs to be up 24/7 and I want my staff to concentrate on sales, not take care of the website, but that's part of my budget.

In that case Testarossa is the way to go :thumbsup

Custom CMS because open source scripts have tons of unnecessary features plus bloated code.

IMHO and based in 500+ sites built using different CMS, mainly WP, the correct answer in 99 out of 100 times is CUSTOMIZED OPEN SOURCE.

Nowadays, there are CMS for almost anything you want. If it's open source and you need some specific feature... you plug it in. BAM! You saved a few hundred hours of development and thousands of dollars, you have ALL THE FEATURES you wanted plus some that may help and you didn't consider at first for... barely nothing.

Let me ask you this: do you really, really, REALLY think that you'll find someone capable of doing what THOUSANDS of developers around the world helped to create in YEARS of development? REALLY?

I can tell you there are exceptions (Edgeprod is one of those exceptions), but reality is that with 100% custom development, most probably you'll end paying shitloads more money for an extremely sub-par product.

Let me tell you a real life story: we're working right now on a very complex site for one of the biggest online art galleries in the world. Really high end stuff. They're currently using a custom made CMS for which they paid mid 5 figures and took almost a year to be completed. Now they need a lot more features and were wondering if those features could be added. When we saw the brief, I couldn't believe it: most of what they were asking for are default or almost default (by use of plugins) features in WP. We really checked if there was something we were missing because we couldn't believe such crap was possible. We studied their source code and even a retard like me could find the security breaches at first sight, and how the code couldn't be modified in a modular way. Simply incredible. So I honestly told the client: "you can do this all with WordPress, which is free. You only need an additional bridge script in the backend to run the financials and that's it. We can do this in under a month for way less money than what you expected to pay" . Of course we got hired immediately. And things like this happens to us on a weekly basis: see what the client has, noticing it's crap, solving it by using a... FREE solution. Shocking.

Just my 2 :2 cents: of course , but I seriously doubt you'll ever find someone that can HONESTLY tell you this is not the truth in 99 out of 100 cases (just before the coders here go berserk, I'm talking of regular sites like 99.999999% are, not extremely specific back end solutions).

It all depends on really what you expect from the CMS.
As far as I know, Wordpress customed can be the key for success :)

This is very true. Products with mature life-cycles (like WordPress) have been designed with many use-cases in mind .. AND they've been tested (hardened, in many cases) against people wanting to do evil things against those use-cases.

A lot of custom software is poorly designed, poorly executed, or poorly documented. Often times, all three. It's tough to find a quality coder you can trust, and even harder in THIS particular industry.