Ah it has reached that time to redesign my homesite again (http://seraphstudios.net), it has been a week of deep thinking on how should I approach this matter. Should I build it from scratch or should I adopt one of those ‘Super Powered’ CMS (Content Management Systems) instead. Considering that building it from scratch does bring more satisfaction and sense of achievement when it’s completed but it entails doing something that’s already been done, sort of like reinventing the wheel.
After looking at development books, I find that building the site from scratch would really be reinventing the wheel, as it would be like developing a CMS from scratch, instead of doing that wouldn’t it be better to incorporate one of those ready made and highly customizable CMS? So I started looking around for likely candidates for the job. The lucky candidates that caught my attention were Joomla!, Drupal, Seditio, ModX.
Next was evaluation of the candidates: First up we have Joomla!. Been using Joomla! for sometime now, it’s a bit confusing at first but once you get used to it and understand what does what, it’s actually quite user friendly, probably the most userfriendly out of the lot of candidates a picked. However, it was lacking in some departments, the templating system is not that flexible as the phpTemplate system used in other CMSs, now I know people will say get a module or plugin or something for that functionality, but I’m looking at the very core functions of the CMS, things it can do right of the bat, not depending on addons and stuff. Well templating aside, Joomla! still lacks in one major area, categorizing of content, it only allows two levels, Section and Category. For most sites that would be more than sufficient, but it does not quite suit my needs, perhaps the next iteration of Joomla! which is supposed to support infinite levels of categorization would suit me better, but for now, sorry Joomla! you are out of the list.
Next on the list is Seditio, somewhat unheard of until I browsed to artworld’s website which uses it, since I thought their website looked cool, I’d check out the CMS they are using for it. Seditio is great that it supports forums in it’s core functions, but somehow it does not click with me, I guess it’s just the way it output things that does not suit me. It’s a great CMS, look at what artworld did with it, but sorry, I’ll have to pass you up.
We have ModX next in line, reading the features on it’s website sounded promising, what with AJAX support and stuff, but after installing it and going in to the admin and trying to figure things out, it was a big no no, totally confusing, I guess it’s true when I read people’s comments that ModX is difficult to set up, I’m sure it’s a good CMS, but unfortunately I lack the patience to read through all the documentations just to find out how to operate it, CMSs should be used to simplify our work of maintaining websites, just like any tool, you should be able to just pick it up and use it without reading the instructions (like anyone reads instructions). Well maybe I’ll try it out when it’s more user friendly in the future, but for now, you’re out of the list.
Finally we have Drupal, highly popular and highly recommended, I thought I’d try it out, initially it is very confusing to set up the categories, this owes it all to the terms Drupal developers chose to use, taxonomy, terms, vocabulary, those who hate dictionaries will probably spin at looking at this, there’s definitely a learning curve to understanding the terms, but other than that, everything else is pretty straight forward, creating new menus was easy, making them visible, hidden etc. was straightforward as well, next was the templating, nice, phpTemplate, I’m no expert with the system yet, but I see good promise from it, and am willing to give it a shot, what with Drupal 5 just being released, looks like I’ve found my lucky winner for my website, but who knows, it might not work out in the end and I’ll be back to just doing it from scratch. We’ll see how it goes, be sure to check back at my homesite SeraphStudios for my new and hopefully improved website. Till then.
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