I've scoured the Steemit community and chat rooms and have found quite a few web developers both veterans and newbies to the industry, but not many posts on the topic, I decided it's time for that to change.
I've been a web developer for over 2 decades with many years of programming and design experience before it became my official career. I hope to share my experience with all of my fellow steemians and hopefully watch some of you grow, and learn from others myself as the industry continues to evolve, what better place to discuss it but the next-gen social network Steemit!
What is a content management system (cms) and why should I care?
Whether you are a web developer, own a website(s), or are thinking of having one built for your business, hobby, charity, etc., choosing the right CMS is one of the most important decisions you will make for the success and management of the site. The CMS is the back-end of the site, where you or your content managers create, edit, and organize all of the content that is output to the front-end users of the site.
Different platforms have different strengths and weaknesses and NO, EVERY CMS IS NOT CREATED EQUALLY, far from it in fact. Thus, choosing the platform that suits the needs of your audience, as well as yourself and your content managers is of utmost importance. There are a plethora of options to choose from, and most of them are not the right choice no matter how hard Joe Blow the developer, or your best friend's, cousin's, computer genius 14 year old tell you they are. So what factors do you need to consider?
Security
Security is likely one of the biggest concerns, particularly if you plan to offer any Ecommerce on the site or store personal data of members that join and interact on it. Nobody wants to use a site that is likely to be hacked and their personal information and financial data stolen and abused. You also don't want people to be able to jump into your system and edit pages or product prices for pranks for other mischievous behavior.
For these reasons you should only use a CMS that is proven to hold security as an absolute priority. We've all heard about the frequent security holes found and abused on websites with customers data being leaked and websites defaced. Do you want to put yourself, your clients, or your customers at risk? Of course you don't!
Scalability
Do you expect the website to grow? Is it large already? You need to be sure that the CMS that the site is built on is able to scale based on your growth-plan. This does not only mean "can it handle 10,000 articles" it also means "is managing 10,000 articles, 50,000 products with 100,000 variants and 2 million users and 5,000 categories still feasible?".
Many platforms may be fine for new sites without much data in this regard but as the site grows, more content is inevitably added, more users view/join/interact; can the CMS the site is built on handle it? Is it still easy to use and manage or is it going to cause you to go bald at the age of 30?
Whether you are highly ambitious or modest in your future plans, scalability should be taken into account for when the time comes. You don't want to have to re-develop the entire site on a new platform just because you picked the wrong CMS initially do you? Of course you don't!
Site Users
Site users of course are one of the highest priorities. We should always put those that use our sites at the epitome of importance, this includes their security as mentioned above, as well as their general experience while browsing the site.
Most platforms are built with a very rigid structure. If you want to break out of this structure to suit the ideal experience for your users, the web developer, be that you or someone else, has to hack the platform to work how you like. This is bad for many reasons.
- When you need to update the CMS in keeping up with security is your site going to break because of all the hacking that was done to make it function how you wanted for your end-users?
- Will the developer that made the hacks document them well and will he/she still be around if something needs to be changed? If you are the developer, will you still remember what you did and why? My guess is no unless you commented your code extensively.
- Do that hacks even work exactly how you want them to or do you have to jump through so many hoops that you feel like you are solving a 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle every time you want to edit the simplest of things?
- How much bloat is caused by having to hack and re-hack a platform that was built with such a rigid structure that does not at all fit in-line with how the site works? How much slower is it because of this and how much extra noise in the code is output?
In short, it is much better to select a platform that has structure that is flexible enough to allow the developer, be that you or someone else, to build EXACTLY what you need, nothing more, nothing less. That allows you to have exactly what you want without hacking the platform to do things it wasn't built specifically for.
BUILD THE BOX AROUND YOU, DON'T BUILD INSIDE A PRE-BUILT BOX.
Ease of Management
Now this is a big one that most site owners don't think about until it is too late. How simple is it to manage your content? Do you need to have a degree in computer science in order to update content? Is navigation a platform like Wordpress so obfuscated to do what you want if it's anything other than a basic blog? This is all obviously pretty unacceptable for anybody serious about their online presence. It's also something that MANY people and businesses seem to accept blindly because they don't know any better.
What if I were to tell you that there are platforms available that are so simple to use and manage that somebody with basic word processing skills would be able to master it immediately, would that be something that you'd be interested in?
Craft CMS
Based on all of the areas i have touched on above, and the plethora of CMS I've worked in throughout my career, Craft CMS is what i recommend to 99.99 times out of 100. It is the perfect balance of structure and flexibility, giving you only what you need with no additional bloat.
Developers are able to build EXACT to the site's specifications from the ground up using the powerful TWIG templating language.
In addition to that, an item not mentioned above is localization or the ability to have different translations of site content for different locals. Due to the fact that CraftCMS is built on the YII framework, localization is a breeze and extremely intuitive.
Craft is unlike any content management system I have ever used, the closest runner up being Expression Engine. Treating users, assets, text content, pages, products, etc. all as CONTENT TO BE MANAGED. Fields can be shared, relationships can be tied across all types of content, you can have different page types for the same section with different available fields.
Craft CMS is truly a developers toybox in making the masterpiece of their career.
Personally I have started building sites in a bit of a unique way. In content creation I provide clients with 2 options they can select (or mix and match) Basic which provides pre-created layout options with a set number of fields per section, and Advanced which allows the more experienced users to create the most unique layouts they can imagine. This is all from within the same platform, and without any bloat!
Craft CMS also attracts the most attractive developers in the web development industry. We're talking people such as Ryan Irelan, Ryan Masuga, Michael Rog, Jeffrey Zeldman (also big on Drupal as he speaks at drupal conferences), Brandon Kelly, etc.
I am yet to find a site where Craft is not the 100% correct option to use as the content management system and I am known within the industry for quickly finding and breaking software (on purpose to test their limits).
In closing
Scout your options when building a site or having a site built for you. Don't settle for working inside a pre-set box, don't settle for needing a web developer on staff full-time, don't settle for temporary setups. Think long term, think big, think who needs to manage it, and most of all think who needs to use it! If you ask me, Craft is where it's at, as previously stated for 99.99% of use-cases.