CMS versus HTML/PHP

[Entropy2]

FNG here with a question that has probably been addressed a thousand times (but I can't find). I'm building a small business website for myself that will serve more as advertising of my (consulting) business rather than ecommerce. The complexity therefore is low/medium, but its looks and ease of content change are important.

 

Given my time constraints in learning HTML/PHP and any new builder software (Dreamweaver, Kompozer, etc.), why wouldn’t/shouldn’t I use a CMS?? More specifically, given the vast amount of open source content, templates and drop-in widgets, why wouldn’t I use Wordpress?

 

I understand not using HTML limits my design flexibility to what is contained in the template I select, but if I'm willing to give up some flexibility to save significant time and money (on Dreamweaver), isn't Wordpress the best choice? Further, given the drop-in widgets that are becoming available, doesn’t Wordpress actually represent the MOST flexible alternative?

 

Thanks for your advice.

[newseed]

There is nothing wrong with using CMS. Wordpress is definately a good one. If you are happy with a template that is available then by all means go for it.

 

Keep in mind however, that if you want to tweak a little here and there which might require some customization, then having a bit of html and css knowledge would help in the process. Of course you know where to look for help.

[krillz]

See CMS as a ready to go tool that saves a lot of time.

 

You can't really take the two head to head and say what to choose it's all about what you are aiming at doing. A lot use a good CMS as a base then tweak it into doing what they want using perhaps PHP/HTML depending in what language it's written.

 

Others decide to reinvent the wheel and spend months on coding something that ends up working pretty much the same as the ready to go CMS in the first place and then ponders why they coded it when it was there all a long.

 

I go by the motto: If you need something solved and there is something on the market that solves your problem with a good userbase and content users, then go with it, even if it does parts of what you are aiming it is a lot easier to add the functionality you are missing yourself than recoding the entire stuff from scratch.

 

If you look at companies creating their own CMS solutions they are doing so for a reason, most often because they need very unique functionality or complex functions that might mean that adding them into an existing CMS can prove to be more work or it's just not possible. Or they do not want a highly used platform that many people use for the simply reason as when you got a lot of people using something then you got the hundreds of scriptkiddies doing exploit sniffing to get access and they don't want to bother about being targeted 10 minutes after an exploit for that platform is published on the net.

 

OT: I say: If you are not aiming at becoming a PHP developer or full time html coder then just learn the basics or enough that you can handle fixes or adding something minor.. changing some small parts yourself then use the CMS's functionality. Otherwise it's pretty much a waste of productive time to learn a bunch of stuff that you will end up not using anyway.

[Entropy2]

Thanks for the responses Newseed and Krillz. You confirmed my thoughts. Can you tell me, is Wordpress or other CMS generated code still built on a platform of HTML/css/PHP that can be modified with an HTML editor like Komposer or Dreamweaver? Is coding in Wordpress or Joomla unique to those programs?

 

Thanks again

[falkencreative]

Wordpress is built on standard HTML/CSS/PHP. A basic text editor or something like Komposer or Dreamweaver can edit Wordpress files.