Skip to main content

A case for WordPress; or, not your own CMS

I've worked at several major companies thus far in my career; and, at each of those companies, I've had to use an in-house Content Management System (CMS) to create and modify digital content.  For a long time, I couldn't understand why those companies would choose to allocate time, resources, and ultimately money to create a customized CMS in spite of having functionally equivalent, open source solutions readily available in the marketplace.  What was their rationale for doing so, I often wondered?  Was their businesses so unique that an off-the-shelf CMS simply wouldn't cut it; were the security risks associated with an open source CMS too great of a burden to bear; or, was it because the software engineer(s) in charge at the time simply wanted to showcase their PHP, Java, Python, etc. programming skills by building yet another CMS from scratch.  Well, in the years since I first pondered that question, I've come to realize that the answer is often the latter reason.

Don't get me wrong, there are legitimate security concerns with open source or off-the-shelf products.  However, I've found that most of those concerns can be easily mitigated with sensible access controls and regular vulnerability patching policies.  What's more, I've found that leveraging a dedicated open source community or third-party vendor whose sole focus is a given product often produces a more secure product than anything else a "regular" company could build on their own.  The same can be said for bug fixes and new feature development from open source or off-the-shelf products -- be it a CMS, Project Management Software (PMS), or Application Performance Management (APM) solution.

And yet, many companies continue to go down the "let's build it ourselves" path instead of choosing to use open source ones.  Such a decision, in my experience, usually ends up being bad for the vast majority of companies.  In fact, I've yet to encounter a situation in which it's made sense for a company to build their own CMS from scratch.  To be clear, I'm not saying that it can never make sense to build one's own CMS; just that it rarely does!  Thus it should be the default position of most companies to simply buy or use an open source CMS whenever possible.

Having said that, a common refrain I still hear is that a particular business' operations are too unique to use an off-the-shelf product like a CMS.  I think that line of argument is laughable!  The truth be told, there's nothing particularly unique about the way company "A" creates and publishes its content from that of company "B".  Rather, a company's true value proposition is in its proprietary product line(s) and not its digital content and/or User Experiences (UX).

But let's say I've managed to convince you, which CMS do you choose?  Well, there are so many out there, i.e. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, dotCMS, Crafter CMS, etc.  My recommendation, in a word, is to use WordPress.  Why?  Because WordPress has been around for close to two decades; it's chock-full of features, plugins, and themes; and, it powers close to half the web, including such companies as Facebook, Etsy, BBC America, MTV News, and The New Yorker - just to name a few.  What's more, WordPress' security notification and self-patching systems are best-in-class and a breeze to use.  So, do yourself and your company a favor and choose WordPress; it's very unlikely that you'll never regret the decision.  Or, if WordPress isn't your cup of tea, then just choose some other random CMS -- just don't build yet another one yourself.

Comments

  1. EasyUEFI Enterprise Crack owns comprehensive EFI/UEFI boot option management functions, such as create, delete, edit, clean up, backup and.EasyUEFI Enterprise 4.9.2.0 With Crack Free Download

    ReplyDelete
  2. God Bless Quotes residence of the pious is blessed by God. He invariably can bless your and grant you what you merit if you follow His commands.God Bless Quotes For Friends

    ReplyDelete
  3. Fans of NFL underdog teams, for instance, will choose to guess on their teams at even odds than to guess on the favourite, whether or not the guess is $5 or $50. Gamblers may exhibit a 우리카지노 number of|numerous|a variety of} cognitive and motivational biases that distort the perceived odds of events and that affect their preferences for gambles. Gloria Mundi, or The Devil addressing the sun, a cartoon displaying the British politician Charles James Fox standing on a roulette wheel perched atop a globe displaying England and continental Europe. The implication is that his penniless state, indicated by turned-out pockets, is due to of|as a end result of} of} playing.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Black Lives Matter: I CAN'T BREATHE

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a political and social movement that protests against police brutality and violence towards black people.  In July 2013, the movement began with the use of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African-American teen Trayvon Martin 17 months earlier in February 2012.  The movement became nationally recognized for street demonstrations following the 2014 deaths of two African Americans, that of Michael Brown—resulting in protests and unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, a city near St. Louis—and Eric Garner in New York City.  Since the Ferguson protests, participants in the movement have demonstrated against the deaths of numerous other African Americans by police actions or while in police custody. Listed below is a shortlist of black men -- grandfathers, fathers, husbands, sons, and nephews -- that have died at the hands of the police and white supremacists in America. Patrick Lynn Warren Sr.,

A better UI/UX for Cookie consent banners

I'm sure you've seen them before; those pesky, inescapable  Cookie consent banners !  They typically appear at the top or bottom of websites -- often obscuring important content.  For example, if you were to visit  CNN ,  Zara , or  Unicef  today; or, any other news, e-commerce, or charitable website for that matter -- especially those with an international presence -- you'd likely see one; a UI / UX eyesore.  Such Cookie consent banners, ubiquitous and omnipresent, have become the defacto solution for complying with an important part of the European Union's (EU) ePrivacy Directive  (ePD). If you're unfamiliar with the ePD, it basically mandates that websites first obtain a user's consent before storing and/or retrieving any Personally Identifiable Information  (PII) about them in and/or from HTTP cookies.  ( HTTP Cookies are small pieces of data stored by websites in a user's web browser for easier retrieval later.)  The Cookie Law, as the ePD has becom

Reduce the transfer size of HTML responses

According to the HTTPArchive , the average transfer size of all HTML responses for a single website is 50kB.  That's not much -- especially when compared to the size of JS, CSS, image, or even font resources -- but those 50kB nonetheless add to the ever increasing bloat of webpages.  Bloated webpages   make websites dreadfully slow, and even a minor increase in load time can cause a significant decrease in sales, according to both  Google and Amazon .  So HTML transfer size matters; it's an important metric to pay attention to and to reduce.  That's why I'll be focusing on several ways in which to reduce that 50kb number in this article. To begin, let's take a look at a few websites. A cursory check of the top 500 websites  shows that they contain dozens of useless tags that neither add value to end-users nor to browsers tasked with rendering them.  A case in point is the  Engadget  website, which can be inspected by right-clicking on the site's homepage and s