Why reinventing the wheel sucks

I’m not a big fan of building custom CMSes*

I just rarely see the point in creating a CMS from scratch, when there are many open-source alternatives out there that will get the job done. Writing your own CMS just because ‘the code base sucks’ is not a good enough reason.

Let me explain why.

You start off writing the CMS. The code base is fantastic (because you wrote it), it is well architectured, and it does various wonderful things like editing content, creating users, perhaps even eCommerce.

Then you present it to the client, and they want more functionality. They start questioning why your CMS doesn’t do CMS-like functions that other CMSes do. You slap on said functionality, just to keep the client happy and then they continue to request for more functions (which, in hind-sight, should have already been created in the first place)

After all that’s over, the client starts questioning about how un-user-friendly the CMS is.

What started as a simple and humble CMS, now is a nightmare to customise and maintain. It may even also be over-budget.

If you do keep decide to keep pushing on and on to build more and more components into the custom CMS, it suddenly begins to look a lot more like many of the open source alternatives out there.

And hence, you have spent many, many months, reinventing the wheel.

*The only exception is if the client requests for it, or if the functionality that is being asked for is too custom to be able to be fitted into a standard CMS. However, my preference still is to build on top of an existing CMS.