Question

Hay Guys, I’m about to dive in and create a CMS for all my future projects to be based off. I’ve looked at others about (wordpress, expression engine, etc) All of them have excellent features.

I guess the basic question is: What do you guys think is a must have when developing a CMS?

I’ve got the simples down. Media handling, Content Handling, Author Handling, Bug Tracking.

Answer 1

This might sound facetious but… if you are developing a CMS system (or in fact any system) for yourself then you should focus entirely on the needs of your immediate projects.

What I mean by this is that possibly the greatest advantage of developing your own system is that it doesn’t have any of the uneccessary features (and bugs) that you dont use.

In fact, I’d say its very important to only implement features that will actually be used, the reason being that if a feature doesnt get used then the chances are that it will be riddled with bugs because its not been extensively tested and used by users.

Keeping the code base nice and clean also means that its simpler to add functionality in the future as and when its needed (helped by the fact that your familiar with the code base)

For example, unless you want your users to be able to change the look and feel of their site at the click of a button you probably shouldnt implement a theme / skinning system. Instead just make sure that you properly separate out the UI portions of your code so its nice and easy to modify the look and feel of your CRM when you need to.