Is your CMS doing everything for you?

CMS content management systems

[philooo]

Hello,

I am a long time adept to Content Management Systems (CMS). I would say that I could not live without one and they made my all internet content publishing business possible. Especially to allow multiple author to write content within consistent designs.

But CMS can't do it all. Sometime you have to build a static page. I alway try to stay away form them as I think they are too much pain to maintain

So how do you make a decision on a page that cannot be managed by your CMS? Do you build it manually even if it will be a pain to maintain? or you forget about it and get back into volume publishing using your favorite CMS?

Phil

[RobinL]

Thats a really good call. We basically made a decision early on that we need a very reliable and versatile CMS so if we ran into a situation where it couldn't handle a page we would recode it to make it capable. It's good to think about having your CMS "broad". You have to constantly walk the line of having it very broad and having it specialized to your site's needs though.

Robin

[Filipe]

The way my CMS handles it is simple. Each "article" (which can just be pseudo-static pages) has an "Alias" that can be accessed via url, e.g.,:

[yoursite.com...]

So an article on "bullfrogs" can go to:

[yoursite.com...]

But in my site's templates, there is a directory also called "content". The way my CMS resolves content is to:

1. Check the database for a matching article
2. Check the content directory for a matching template
3. Return a 404 Error

That way, in the odd case that I need to have static pages (which does come up since I like to have certain templated content that ports easily from site-to-site) I just keep it in static form in the content directory. Usually, it's only 2 or 3 pages on there per site, but it happens.