Your own full-featured CMS

Come on, who else is sitting on one?

[absolutelyme]

I don't mean something owned by your employer, I mean something you own yourself. I'm very interested to see how many full time self-employed webmasters (perhaps 'traffic baron' would be a better description of the class of reader I am describing) have their own equivalent.

I've tried some open source CMSs now and then, but they never seem to do what needs to be done right. They usually fall over in areas like multilingual work, elegant extensibility, clear development road maps, scalability, freedom of programming paradigm, etc. Of course, there's no code like your own code when you need to make a change.

Does anyone else out there have multiple installations of their own CMS, continue to re-use it and add functionality, and see it as superior to what is available as open source?

If so, what have you got?

For reference, here's some of the modules I've got on top of my base system (fully multilingual / unicode enabled)...

- Articles (including categories)
- Advertising
- Classifieds
- Contact data that is extensible (ICQ? Skype? Mobile phone? SWIFT code?)
- Events and calendar generation
- Directory of places
- Email alerts, lists & management
- Email a friend
- Forums
- Geography (countries/states/counties/cities)
- Hotel booking (this month!)
- Image handling (resize, associate with other db elements)
- News archive (for archiving external page news reports)
- RSS (for articles, news, etc.)
- SMS sending
- Maps (basic, custom but highly functional GIS system)
- Human + machine translation
- User logins, management (lost password, etc.)
- User favourites
- User ratings (including multiple rating types, etc.)

... and probably more I can't remember.

[absolutelyme]

Some things I forgot.

- Wiki system for content ties the whole thing together
- Currencies and exchange rates modules

Coming: payment processing (i assume this will be a useful extension ;), hotel booking, event booking, robot detection.

[pmkpmk]

multilingual work, elegant extensibility, clear development road maps, scalability, freedom of programming paradigm

Oh, you're talking about Typo3?

Kidding aside: except for SMS sending Typo3 has all the features you asked for in your list, plus the the core-features highlighted in your quote. Especially the clear development roadmap and the commitment to security as well as scalability make it such a great system.

The only downside is that you need to master a steep learning curve.

[absolutelyme]

Hrrm, yeah. Typo3 seems to be headed in a similar direction, though not as functional in the core areas I need. Back on topic though, who else is sitting on a good codebase?

[pmkpmk]

OK, since nobody has replied in the meantime:

I think the reason you get no answers is that either people developing a CMS on their own create extremely specialized systems, suitung only their needs or - and I think this is the much more realistic conclusion - use one of the freely available CMS out there and expand it for themselves.

You already said that Typo3 covers most of what you had in mind. Since it can be easily expanded, both with so-called extensions and even with "hooks" in the core architecture, I'm sure you can fit in the parts you need. And I'm sure the community would benefit would you decide to male them publicly available too.

[shri]

I tend to look at plugin architectures (after the SEO friendly urls) of a CMS.

Seriously take a look at building around vBulletin if your ContentMS requires community solutions, calendaring, messaging etc.

Also look for third party support, Joomla and vBulletin have tons of third party plugins that work well.

We've started using Joomla with a custom bridge to vBulletin and an assortment of Joomla Plugins + vBulletin add-ons. For us to roll out a new site it would take a few hours.. for us to explain the customized solution would take a few weeks.

[dataguy]

I've got my own CMS.... had to build my own to do very specific tasks for clients. The main criteria was to create something idiot-proof, and I think I did very well at this. It has a hiarchial permissions structure to allow people to edit only their department and any sub-departments. The content is also date-based, so each department can create content which will only appear on the web site at the correct time, and also on the calendar. It's also very SEO friendly and doesn't use any querystrings.

The end result is a huge website which has up-to-date information because each department is responsible for their own content, and the web site changes so frequently people want to go back to it several times per day to see what's new.

It's currently being used by 8 different organizations. This design is a few years old and in desparate need of an update, but I just don't have the time. Seems to me that if I had a fresh version I could sell hundreds of copies.

[ronburk]

Seems to me that if I had a fresh version I could sell hundreds of copies.

With the downside being... you would be stuck with hundreds of customers, all chirping at you with their beaks open, like hungry little baby birds :-)

CMS is one of those phrases that sounds like a product category, but actually is a meta-category. Under the umbrella of "CMS" are lots of different classes of problems and users. The net result is that CMS is a giant market -- but the market for any individual CMS product is a small fraction of the overall market. This lesson is exemplified by CityDesk, the CMS that Joel On Software created and then turned into frozenware when it didn't "take off".

Despite all that, I'm foolish enough to be writing my own CMS to sell. Any dreams of profitability are based on targetting a highly specialized niche (the insane folks who create websites from scratch in HTML with Notepad -- I want to convert them to XML and the joys of automated generation) and trying to relentlessly minimize my support/marketing costs to microscopic, 1-guy-in-a-garage proportions.

[Demaestro]

I have one that I made based on the Zope CMS product.

I have build many custom products for it as well that I can drop in, like forums, photo galleries. They all have dynamic nav and sitemaps as well as built in site search.

I set up default repositories so that when you upload a file it places it in the proper repository so all PDFs live in the same folder and images in the same folder. For image uploads it uses pil to covert images that aren't web friendly to a web friendly type. Creates thumbnails at time of upload as well that can be called into pages using the editor. I used fckEditor, used to use htmlarea but it has been discontinued.

It also uses a workflow product some guys I know and I wrote for Zope. Can allow objects to be submitted to be published, rejected, retracted, it also uses a versioning tool that was built for Zope that allows pages to be worked on with out affecting the live version. Once a version is completed, depending on the workflow and user permissions, it can be submitted to replace the live version or just published to swap out the old version. Previous versions are stored and can be swapped out to be live again if a page needs to be retracted.

So many other things, I have been building it for about 4 years and have almost completed my 2.0 version.

If anyone is interested in a Demo PM me.

[edited by: Demaestro at 10:29 pm (utc) on Dec. 8, 2006]