Why Custom CMS?

Despite their popularity, our experience in building over 20 large Websites has shown us that off-the-shelf CMS products such as Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress are not living up to expectations for several reasons:

• From conception, they were designed to be everything to everybody. They are built without any knowledge of the information architecture of the Website they are to manage. In contrast, we design the Website first and then build a custom CMS that is tailored to the needs of the Website. The difference is akin to the difference between a ready-made suite and a tailored suite.

  A custom CMS is light, fast, and easy to use since, unlike canned/one-size-fits-all CMS products, it does not come with tonnes of stuff that you do not need.

• Many people and teams have left their marks on these products. In many cases the original architect or architects have long left for greener pastures. As the result, the product quality varies greatly from release to release and from component to component. For functionality not present in the core CMS product, integration with third-party plug-ins written by yet another person or team is often necessary. This, in turn, introduces further inconsistency and uncertainty into the product.

  This should not be taken as a criticism of the open-source model (our CMS is open-source and can be modified without our permission) but successful open-source products are those that are often lower on the food chain(operating systems, programming languages, servers) with original developer or developers sticking around and keeping a tight control over the overall quality (PHP, Linux, Apache).

• There is no assurance that defects in off-the-shelf CMS products will ever be fixed. There are many existing bugs in these products that remain unfixed for years despite repeated requests from the user community. In contrast we warranty to fix any defect in the Website and its custom CMS at any time during the lifetime of the Website.

• Poor architectural decisions in building of an off-the-shelf CMS product will often spill over to the Website forcing the programmer to follow - no matter how unsound - the approach dictated by the CMS architects.

  For example, in WordPress, there is no separation between data and presentation layers: WordPress PHP functions return data wrapped in HTML markup. To use different markup the programmer must modify the WordPress core function libraries (a tall order for most WordPress programmers) but even a hack like that is no substitute for a 3 tier architecture (that's what we use).

  Due to inflexible and templated architectures, Websites built using off-the-shelf CMS products appear similar to each other and have a cookie-cutter look and feel to them. This may be a problem if you wish your Website to stand out as unique and distinct.

• Maintaining and adding new features to an off-the-shelf CMS product requires the services of a programmer with expertise in that particular CMS. In contrast, our CMS is written in plain PHP without using any framework whatsoever so any junior-level PHP programmer can read, understand, and modify the code. A few years from now, there may be no programmer with either expertise or interest in troubleshooting a Joomla CMS but PHP being a language will probably have a longer shelf life.

These products fill a niche similar to one filled by Web authoring tools such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver: no experienced Web programmer will use FrontPage or Dreamweaver for coding HTML/CSS as they generate bloated and invalid markup but they are nevertheless popular and in wide-spread use by junior programmers in the lower end of the market (personal Websites, neighborhood pop and mom pizza shop, and flavour of the week start-ups).