Can I build a custom made cms into an opensource cms? [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.

I always preferred building my own cms because it is totally adjustable to my own needs or for customers. At the moment I am just a starting/mediocre programmer and now I am looking into the more populair opensource cms's like joomla, drupal etc.. because it looks attractive to me that they have so many standard modules. I never tried an other cms than my own and I just tried the demo of joomla (backend) and I'm absolutly horrified by it and directly want to crawl back into my cave with my own made cms. Way to many options for me and absolutly not user-friendly in my opinion.

My question is: Can I build a website that has a custommade cms with an opensource cms so I can adjust the custom cms and let it be userfriendly. Like a cms in a cms. It sounds weird, it probably is but reading about the modules they have makes me still want to use it, even if I have to take a weird leap to accomplish that.

Cheers!

Answer 1

Well... sure, I guess. If you familiarize yourself with customization methods provided by your chosen CMS, you can probably theme and customize the CMS to your hearts content.

Alternatively, if you familiarize yourself significantly with the data structures and the database schema, you could just write your own interface to access and update those data structures.

In truth, probably your main problem with the CMSs as is just a lack of familiarity. Especially considering how you've characterized yourself as a "starting/mediocre" programmer, you'd be better served just learning the CMS and learning how to add new stuff on to it.

Don't get me wrong, I don't disagree with your feelings about those CMSs, most of them did not have a strong UX designer (and, in some cases, data architect) involved from the beginning stages and they're suffering for it now. But not suffering so much that most people could appreciably do better. Take the word of someone who has created not just a custom CMS but a custom framework upon which to develop: it's easy to do one thing the best it's ever been done. It's hard to do everything and have it even be passable.

Answer 2

My main motivation for creating sites with opensource frameworks was and still is security. I feel better at night knowing that my application has been extensively tested in things im not yet in expert. anyways I usually use wordpress because is relatively easy to learn and really easy to modify. Also, is really user friendly and you don't require a lot of plugins to make it work as you want out of the box.

you can read more about using wordpress as an cms here

http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/use-wordpress-as-a-cms-content-management-system/ http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/creative-coding/using-wordpress-as-a-web-application-framework/

and some esentials on how to start developing for wordpress

http://net.tutsplus.com/tag/wordpress/

One of the neat thing that you could also do with wordpress is to hooked it up to your cms and just use some of its functionality as described here http://www.problogdesign.com/wordpress/use-wordpress-as-a-php-framework-for-your-static-html-pages/ this way you can have far more control over it but i will strongly recommend to just use the whole platform instead that way you will be able to always update to the latest version with no problem at all.

i hope it helps