Why build a CMS

Yes this is a good question indeed – one Neil and I have asked ourselves on a number of occasions and unfortunately we’ve always come up with the same answer – because there isn’t a good enough one out there yet. We’ve tried and tried to fit clients into existing systems again and again and have only had limited success – primarily because the admin interface is just not suited to that particular client’s needs and despite our best hacking efforts we have always needed to produce lots of documentation or training videos to show them how to do the stuff they need to. Fair enough – if we were after simple page editing functionality then there are solutions out there – but no open source efforts have managed to achieve what they needed without plugins and workarounds.

We have worked with Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, Expression Engine and a few others that I can’t even remember but nothing has inspired us with the confidence to say ‘yes it can do that’ in the initial client pitch meeting without thinking of the plugins and hacks we would have to put in there. Which is why we have developed a number of systems over the years – I’ve done various Java and PHP efforts before joining up with TAK and working on their Wrapper system which had already gone through 2 iterations from VB to C#. The system wasn’t perfect but we knew how we could provide exactly the right amount of functionality to the client that allowed them to edit pages in a really nice way and  make important relationships between entities. (to be continued…)