In my current hunt for freelance I have noticed, CMS requests have popped up everywhere, like a rampant trend and indeed requests for normal static development seem slim to none. I wanted to examine this a little bit. After establishing my own Drupal / Joomla site to tinker with, I can see why people like them. A company or business is given literally hundreds of options for dynamic and group development. However being a one person company I find myself developing my own site with big concepts and tinkering for hours only to leave the functions off as it can eventually be overwhelming for an individual who does not need a gigantic CMS for one resume and graphic artwork. Us web designers are left needlessly developing our own CMS sites just to stay competitive in the new CMS web market.
Don’t you think it is true that real developers should work on other peoples sites? Kelly Martinez an amazing programmer I went to college with told me this once and while I tweek and build on my own sites his advice from long ago rings very true to my work today. Drupal is so fun and immense however I cannot help myself.
So I will post a list of pros and cons feel free to add to them and as we get further into the days of CMS development the pros will and can eventually out weigh the cons if they are here to stay. Maybe I should do this article in a user editable Drupal book, but today I just feel like writing in my old fashion static Wordpress blog.

CMS Pros

It can do a-lot of dynamic programming for very little money.

Lots of people can be involved.

The dynamic programming is fun and easy compared to the manual old fashioned way.

You do not need a multimedia degree to do it.

There are great learning resources on the web for Drupal developers.

CMS Cons

Proceed at your own risk: If you are stretching your limbs and programming with PHP in the advanced box apparently the wrong code can break your whole site. If you are working on a client site and not your personal testing ground, this could be a big opps that could cost you the client.

Backups are a pain as you did not put the files up via ftp, when the computer crashes or hosting is not renewed on time you might not have a current backup including what others have contributed.
The image file paths a big pain and would so much rather just insert a pic with Dreamweaver, save and upload.

Dynamic pages are bad for SEO.

Your visitors can encounter too many blogs in too many places. OK so after 3 blogs and counting where should I develop? Do my site explorers really need 3 separate usernames and passwords to chat where I have posted? Yes CMS leaves no room for the lazy user.

Loose with permissions and your site could get hacked.

There are great learning resources on the web for Drupal developers that can take up ALL of your spare time, this means when you are logging hours you must log out for tutorial time to keep your prices low and less time for WOW. ;D

You do not need a multimedia degree to do it

Vote at my Drupal pole, please!

Tags: CMS, Drupal

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 8:14 pm and is filed under CMS Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.