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Beyond the world of Content Management Systems (CMS)

February 19, 2008 · Posted in Entrepreneurship 

Of all the emails and review requests I receive from various startups, I end up writing about only a handful of them. Some get left out due to lack of time (sorry guys !!) and several others are just not upto the mark.

It is the latter that I want to address in this post.

A lot of the attempts that fall into this category seem to be half baked ideas conceived over a weekend. Majority use an existing Content Management System (CMS) with an equally lousy design. I sincerely hope that these folks dont consider themselves to be entrepreneurs based on their lame projects. Because if so, then some one needs to break the bad news to them. Sorry guys - these half ass projects are going to get you nowhere.

While there are definitely some good CMS’s out there, they hardly come in one size fits all flavor. Besides, majority of the present day CMS’s are bloated and ugly.

If an existing CMS plugs into your idea - great !!

But what if it doesnt ?

You’ll still need to develop that first prototype, assuming that you cant secure any funding till the initial prototype is ready.

For that to happen, either

(i) You need to be a code monkey and can code your website yourself

or

(ii) You can rope in a friend to code the website for you (Kevin Rose hired a friend to code the first version of Digg)

or

(iii) Hire a web development agency to do the work for you

Option (i) would obviously be the best option one can hope for.

Option (iii) would mean that you either need to bootstrap the initial expenses from your own savings or tap into your friends - family.

Its better you invest your time, money and effort in any of the above 3 options instead of trying to mould / mod a CMS to fit your needs.


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4 Responses to “Beyond the world of Content Management Systems (CMS)”

  1. BG Mahesh on February 21st, 2008 6:39 am

    CMS is one the most important component of a content based portal. CMS is needed for other portals also, but I think it plays a very important role for a content portal.

    As you rightly said, there few good opensource CMS out there but it becomes difficult at times to extend the features. We developed our own CMS for oneindia.in which supports English and all Indian languages. Over years we have added very complex features and the content team is able to focus just on the content and not worry about publishing at all.

    – Mahesh

  2. Bollywood on February 22nd, 2008 2:22 am

    I love to create my own cms using smarty & php. Whenever you encounter critical bug in open source (other coded) CMS. It’s very painful to fix loop holes.

    For large scale sites, I won’t use third party CMS at all.

  3. Tarun on February 22nd, 2008 3:16 am

    Sorry guys, i agree & dis-agree, although third party CMS w/o extensive customization are not suited for most of the commercial sites, there is nothing wrong with someone using one & trying to create a prototype over the weekend for his idea. As long as he understands that it is only a pilot and not a full scale commercial version he should be fine.
    I would any day go to a site which has been coded quick & dirty but provides VALUE than a fancy coded site which is probably just a clone/ape of some western site and provides no intrinsic value.

    Cheers

  4. pranav on February 24th, 2008 7:40 pm

    @tarun,

    as i said, if a CMS serves the purpose - great!!…But dont try to make the CMS fit into your needs forcibly.