Orchard CMS - code or UI when doing custom extensions?

Question

I have a question for professional Orchard developers?

Given that I can create new ContentTypes and ContentParts using the UI, when should you use the UI to create new Content Types/Parts versus creating a custom module and coding everything. What are the tradeoffs? Is there a time to combine the approaches and create some of your content types/parts in the UI and then extend them further using code?

What are the advantages of each method? (For example, it seems to me that deploying changes is easier using code...but still possible using the UI using the Import/Export module?

UI it seems you get things done pretty quickly, but is less flexible and portable than writing code?

What are the things you HAVE to do in code?

Answer 1

I tend to start by using the UI to test ideas and just adding templates to my theme to display these new parts. I also use the UI when I just want to add a new part to an existing type.

Where I find making a very simple module with my types specified in migrations useful is where I have a site in production that I know will need upgrading in the future. I have a dev version of the site that I play about with and then when ready to go live I create a migration that will upgrade the site.

This also means I can test the migration before going live and I don't need to have a list of manual changes required to make to the live site that is prone to mistakes.