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Ask YC: CMS? opinions?

3 points by xenoterracide ↗ HN
we are developing web software, although we decided that our company might want to make more than one thing so our first product is going to be seen as that and not the company itself.

We aren't interested in building a company site from scratch since there are good cms' available.

what do people recommend? or would it really be better to build one from scratch since we are supposed to be a web software company.

EDIT: I've been thinking about using Joomla but really haven't decided.

EDIT: on another thought does anyone know of any that are postgres friendly? that's the db we are using for our first product.

19 comments

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luct
It depends on the effort to build from scratch, and a marketable product.
run4yourlives
I'm not sure what amount of time a cms would save you.

If it's a smaller site, I'd just use wordpress for easy blogging capability. All the stuff that a CMS would help you with (like dumbing down markup and such) wouldn't be worth my time, to be honest.

Depends on what you're doing though, really.

xenoterracide
wordpress might work. We don't need much since it'll mostly be a point for talking about the company... I doubt we do much with it.
SwellJoe
"I doubt we do much with it."

If that's the case, why are you looking for a CMS?!

Since obviously no one else has told you this, I will:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use a CMS." Now they have two problems.

xenoterracide
well maybe I should put it this way. I personally am not seeing that site as a main development focus. I honestly haven't thought too much about it. There also might be some minor parts of the site that are hard to do with straight blog technology (although I've never used wordpress). That are more designed in to cms.

but as of right now I really don't have much planned into the site.

jdg
Wordpress. Really.

Don't build one from scratch - it's a waste of your time, unless you're planning on turning it into a product later on.

babul
WP is good for blogs but not much else in terms of general website usage esp compared to Drupal/Joomla.
bkbleikamp
Agreed - it is definitely possible to hack WP to run as a general content management system, but it is still based on the idea of a blog, and so content is still organized as "posts" and "pages" which can get old and will cause many sites to hit limitations that require more hacking to get through.
rantfoil
If you like Rails, Mephisto is a pretty flexible way to get a lot of functionality for less work.
blender
Drupal, it's not really a CMS so much as it's a framework
xenoterracide
huh... never heard that about Drupal. makes me even more interested in checking it out.
SwellJoe
CMS means way too many things these days, and most of them (both the things it means and the software that calls itself CMS) are a bad idea. I say this as someone who has deployed not one, not two, not three, not four, but five large scale CMS systems (Zope, Plone, custom thing based on MoinMoin and trac, OpenACS, and finally Joomla). Deployments used by thousands of users for a wide variety of activities.

CMS systems are usually too big to be right for any particular purpose, and so the majority of your development time is spent ripping out the stuff that gets in the way of your users doing what they want to do at your site...Joomla is actually the worst in this regard, though it shines in a few areas (large number of available applications...though I was disappointed to find that 90% of them are absolute garbage and not worth the time it takes to install them, much less the time it would take to make them look right on your site).

Right now, I'm still maintaining the Joomla site, and not terribly happy with it. Since I have to migrate from 1.0.x to 1.5.x, and this is not a trivial project, I'm considering moving to something else. The lazy in me likes the looks of Drupal--all the apps we need (commerce, forums, bug tracker, wiki) would be reasonably easy to put together. But, I think I would be better served by slowly moving all of our very specific requirements (our shop is dead simple, but has very specific requirements for the licensing of our software, for example) out to small custom tools--written in one of our preferred languages--and spend a little bit of time coding shared authentication into the best forums package and the best wiki and the best bug tracker. Since, really, in the end Joomla provides almost nothing for us but a very poor shared authentication system (poor because several of the apps have mysterious bugs that lead to some users being unable to stay logged in throughout a purchase or filing a bug) and a really bad way to update our site data--we only use the "CMS" features for five or six pages on the site, and the editor in Joomla sucks and there is no good way to use the file system for pages.

Anyway, if I had to choose a CMS today, I'd probably choose Drupal, but I think we'll end up with the non-CMS solution to our problems I discussed above. Multiple apps customized to share session data, plus a few small components written exactly for our requirements. Some of the frameworks make this latter kind of deployment easier--Django and Ruby On Rails modules can share authentications reasonably easily.

The thing is, while it looks like you're getting a lot of stuff for free from the existing CMS systems (Joomla, in particular, because it has 80 bazillion available plugins) you actually end up spending a lot of time on customization and cleaning out the crap you don't need. At least, I did. It took me a couple of months to launch our Joomla site, and about a month to launch the OpenACS site before that doing the same job (OpenACS was nicer, by some measures, but it had some serious bugs that weren't getting fixed, and the architecture had become too baroque in version 5 to be reasonably customizable--too many behaviors were baked into the core libraries making it very hard to build custom tools...the docs were also broken beyond belief).

iamdave
I hate to be "that guy" but can you maybe phrase that in less extraneous rhetoric?
SwellJoe
Probably not. You should give it try, though.
rnc000
call me skeptic but I can't envision MoinMoin+trac being used as a large scale CMS system (which means a deployment into a corporation, which means some corporate suit not "buying IBM" and risking losing his job)
SwellJoe
It was not a large corporation. It was a large deployment in the sense of having many documents, many users, and many projects, and needing to handle an occasional slashdotting. Specifically, the site was SciPy.org and its many child sites, and it replaced the Zope CMS that it ran before...so, it turned out to be solved better by tools that didn't call themselves a CMS, but in fact its primary purpose was to manage a lot of content and make it editable by a lot of people. Sorry my use of the word "large" made you think "enterprise"...that wasn't my intention. I've rarely worked for or on large enterprise projects, as it isn't an area I find enjoyable. Turns out MoinMoin makes a pretty good CMS, because it doesn't try to be a CMS.
babul
Opensource = Drupal (I think it is better than Joomla and has even been adopted by IBM into a opensource product for enterprise use)

Proprioretory = Vignette or Documentum (Both are excellent and can be used on small and really large sites with all sorts of added features suitable for online collaboration)

slim
why not use a wiki? its simple, flexible and with the right template it does the job.

try dokuwiki it's my favorite and it uses text files for storage.

xenoterracide
wiki's are one of the most abused softwares (as in used where they shouldn't be). In fact one of our current competitors uses a wiki for what we're building custom software for. It's such a PoS, you can tell it wasn't designed for that use. We might use a wiki for internal documentation at some point.