CMS vs. Code It Yourself

Gudni · July 22nd, 2011, 07:57 AM

Hi there.
I have been a student of Imar Spaanjaars for a while, using first Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 in C# and VB and now, Beginning ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB. This is excellent material, and I have made a few sites which are in current use tiht the help of Imar's books. That was not very hard due to Imar's excellent coaching. My programming tools are VS2008 and VS2010. Although beeing a professional programmer, I am relatively inexperienced in website programming. I have also made a few sites (also in current use) using a Content Management System (CMS), mojoPortal. That was not so hard either. Now my question to this forum is the following: do you folks have an opinion on whether one should use a CMS or code everything oneself? In some ways, I prefer coding everything myself. Also, Visual Studio 2010 has very good support for website programming. But comparing custom code to the use of a CMS, some people say that this is akin to reinventing the wheel.
Any comments?

Imar · July 22nd, 2011, 10:32 AM

Hi there,

I guess it all depends on the site you're building. I think I divide my time evenly between CMS and hand coded projects. For example, for pure content driven sites, a CMS makes a lot of sense. The same goes for eCommerce sites: it's often a lot easier to use a ready-made CMS/eCommerce platform. With a CMS your time to market and costs can be considerably lower than when you build it all yourself.

In other cases, with more complex requirements not directly supported by a CMS, you may be better off building something from scratch, rather than trying to customize the CMS.

Hope this helps,

Imar

Gudni · July 22nd, 2011, 10:54 AM

Thanks, Imar.