Open-source content management systems (CMS) are great. By leveraging them, you can put up a new website in minutes, have access to hundreds (if not thousands) of free and cheap plugins for advanced functionality, and find a ton of mostly-good support.
I've built dozens of websites leveraging Joomla's and WordPress's CMSs and have produced many happy clients.
So why spend the time to build a new CMS from scratch?
It started with PHP. My programming knowledge had expanded so instead of needing to leverage plugins for things such as contact forms and image galleries I could just build them myself. This way I also wouldn't be constrained by the limitations of the chosen plugin.
The same was true for templates - it was just easier for me to layout and design my own pages than to use a prebuilt template and override CSS and JavaScript styles to make the template do what I wanted.
Hey, Tyler here. I'm currently working on some great web development and digital marketing products and services over at ZeroToDigital.
If that sounds interesting to you, please check it out!
So, I really didn't need WordPress or Joomla anymore. In fact, they sort of just got in the way.
The next few websites were built using just PHP for server-side programming and MySQL and JavaScript, CSS and HTML for front-end design. Then, wanting to leverage certain technologies, I started building client sites with Node.js.
It was easy for me to manage the code, but I had many clients who wanted to make their own changes (makes sense), so I needed to build out a complete content management system. Based on different client needs, the CMS now contains default functionality for:
There are currently 12 websites built using this CMS and many of them, having come from other, difficult to use platforms, are happy with the simplicity of the administrator pages and the ability to edit and manage nearly all of the content existing on any page on the front-end of the websites.
Here are a few screenshots of the administrator pages:
