Why reinvent the wheel

Not long ago I realized that my site won't scaling very well with the amount of content I want to add. Somewhere along the road my patchy PHP back-end just won't hack it anymore. The solution of course is to migrate it onto a more automatic content management system. 'No problem' I thought, nothing a little elbow grease won't fix. This was before the end of the summer.

I did manage to write up a framework of a simple CMS I called "uCMS" or "microCMS". I worked on it off and on during the work term, whenever I had no cases to work on. By the end of August, the back-end code was completed, and I left the code behind and went to Japan, gleefully thinking that all I need to do was to finish the front end UI.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I finally had some time to return to the project after exams, and was suddenly overwhelmed at how much I had to do. The Phrame framework that I based my code around was now looking tedious and clunky. The thought of redefining mappings multiple times inside the system just gave me a headache. Extremely unsatisfied with my previous design, I wanted to redo the whole system from the ground up. However the base frame was already working flawlessly, and I heeded the ominous words: "Never revamp unless absolutely needed". However, thinking the road ahead, I realized that there's a lot more to be done. I had no user management system, no gallery management, no search capability, not enough content type, no AJAX ( *grin* ), etc etc.

I decided that it's not worth the effort to develop my code any further. Instead, I turned to existing open source CMS for solution. I did use Joomla while at Autodesk to implement their support docs repository, so naturally I tried to adopt Joomla first. What an exercise in frustration. As sparky as Joomla's multiple awards are, I just found its organization to be awkward at best. Not to mention it's limited menu system that made category automation impossibly difficult. In short, I needed to do substantial amount of tinkering in the system for it to work for my site. A workload that's not unlike what I was trying to avoid at the very beginning. Certainly using the CMS for Autodesk took quite a long time too. Funny how I didn't seem to mind it that much when I was getting paid for it.

Looking elsewhere, I stumbled upon CMS Made Simple. Not the most catchy name to be sure, but it is the most intuitive Open Source CMS out there for me. The admin UI is simple and clean, and all the inner workings of the system are presented in an organized fashion and well documented. There are some areas that left something to be desired for sure, such as the inability to display sub-contents in a section out-of-the-box, and the fact that they save template and CSS code in the database, but the experience has been much better than Joomla.

I finished migrating my site into the new system in less than 10 hours. As I always say after each major overhauls, I sure hope this is the last time that I gotta do something like this.