Picture of admin

dog_food.eaten?==true

  • Posted By admin on June 22, 2005

Fed up, finally, with the various OS CMS systems around, we moved the Relevance website to a custom Rails base. We’re still using WordPress for the blog portion, but everything else is a homegrown amalgam. In the process, I’ve discovered something about myself. I can add a feature to this version faster than I can look for, download, install and figure out plug-ins for the canned systems. That isn’t to say that the canned versions are bad or that I’m some kind of wunderkind, but that, for me, it is easier to think in code than in admin.

Comments
  1. Rob Sanheim — June 22, 2005 @ 11:13 AM
    What CMS packages did you look at and what sort of problems did you run into? I'm curious as I'll be facing the same sort of dilemma pretty soon with my site...
  2. Robby Russell — June 22, 2005 @ 11:40 AM
    Have you considered Typo instead of Wordpress for the blogging?
  3. Justin Gehtland — June 22, 2005 @ 03:34 PM
    Robby -- I have considered Typo, just haven't actually tried it yet. WordPress does pretty much everything I want it to, but I haven't tried to rework the CSS yet, so we'll see how that goes.
  4. Justin Gehtland — June 22, 2005 @ 03:36 PM
    Rob -- We were using Mambo, which was nice, but waaaaay overkill. Also, we had problems with DocMan, the file upload piece, and kept getting bitten by security issues. We've also tried Plone and TextPattern, which were nice, but I found myself struggling a little to add just what we wanted, and realized I could just write it myself in Rails just as fast and have total control.
  5. Jon — June 22, 2005 @ 03:57 PM
    I've discovered the hard way how awful Wordpress is as a CMS. It's great for a blog, but you have to put in so many hacked fixes to turn it into a CMS. That said, I've heard much better things about other systems. Even TextPattern seemed to be a good bit better than Wordpress for general CMS use but I haven't actually implemented it in anything yet.
  6. Fledge To Abu Dhabi — May 10, 2006 @ 01:49 AM
    Thanks for the write-up...
  7. Massey Cadillac — May 13, 2006 @ 05:05 AM
    But I'm not sure why!