I Guess I’m Not A CMS Person.
A couple of years ago another developer told me he was using Jooma, a popular content management system (CMS), for all his sites. I tried Joomla on several sites and decided that I could develop sites easier and faster doing my own coding. I recently saw a site done with Drupal and I decided to give it a try. After a brief exposure to Drupal, I had the same feeling that I had with Joomla. I’m going to continue developing sites on my own.
I’ve been using markup languages since the 1960s, and I’ve been developing web sites since the 1990s, so it may be a case of “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
I think it depends on the specifics of the project. As you are using wordpress for your blog I am guessing you feel similarly to an extent.
Thanks, Mike, for visiting this blog and for your comments. I can’t think of a site our company has developed that would have benefited from the use of a CMS although, admittedly, our small company concentrates on sites for organizations of public and quasi-public agencies. There have been a few occasions when a client wanted a page where members could collaborate on adding content, and we’ve used SnippetMaster (http://www.snippetmaster.com/) for those pages.
You are correct, though, that I wouldn’t try to develop a blog from scratch – it’s much easier to use WordPress.
Yeah, see i work on alot of sites that either are already using a CMS or where a CMS would easiest and quickest route. Such as right now I am working on a music based e-magazine style site and Im using wordpress for it. WordPress already has the ability to post articles to different categories and sub-categories, comment ability and it also gives me the ability to code the way the content is displayed on the front page, category pages and actual article pages independently of each other which is key as well. Although it is meant as a blogging platform, wordpress is a nice CMS to use for magazine/news style sites.
And a little off topic, speaking of snippet master, I have actually recreated that script in the past(in college). I used FCK editor instead of Tiny MCE like they use though.
You are not the only one with usability problems of Drupal, see http://buytaert.net/usability-usability-and-usability
This is a major issue not only for Drupal, but for many CMS systems. The Drupal community is working on it. As the founder Dries states: “I printed the report, taped it on my wall, and I won’t release Drupal 7 until I crossed of at least 90% of the problems they identified.”
Mike: Interesting comment. Based on my limited experience with Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, I thought that WordPress might be a good choice for a static site. With the types of sites I develop, valid CSS and (X)HTML are important. I don’t think I’ve seen a Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress site that validates.
Taco: Thanks for visiting, and thanks for your comment. As a programmer in a former life, I learned that as a program offers more features and versatility, it can become more difficult to maintain usability.
I think if there are errors in validation then for the most part is a problem on the skin/theme developers end. These days most ‘popular’ cms’s come with a default theme that will validate and the wysiwyg editors produce valid mark up. So as far as custom designs, validation is the designer/developers duty just as on a static site.
Also, this is a rare case where a plugin/widget developer may not validate before they release. For example I am using a wordpress ‘about me’ widget I downloaded and it was the only thing that was causing validation errors on my personal site. It was a simple error where the gravatar url was not urlencoded before being set as the path to the image in the widget.
You’re right about the validation. I just did a new installation of WordPress, and with the default theme there were 4 CSS errors and 3 XHTML errors. When I switched to the Classic theme, there were still 4 CSS errors but the XHTML validated. Finally, I installed a third theme and both the CSS and XHTML validated; however, when I opened the comment to the sample post, there were 11 XHTML errors.
With all these comments, I should have installed a forum instead of a blog.
lol@ the forum comment. Sorry, I have a habit or rambling at times.
You mentioned validation errors on a page with comments and it made me realize I never validated a page with comments, only did the front page and pages. So now that I just checked my one of my posts and I realize there yet another error caused by a plugin I installed. I really wish people would validate their plugins before releasing them to the public.