I build wordpress for clients mostly, but had big plans for my own website. However, after a month of work and a lot of research I’ve come to understand what it really means to… create a content management system. There are many things to keep in mind, access to your database, providing a nice looking interface. Making things simple yet also allowing complete customization. The User Object. Which should be static methods, which should be instance? There is a lot too it, and I finally had decided that getting my website up and running is far more important than spending years on a website that (no offense to websites) is not very high on my priority list.
What I will say though is
1) CMS’ are meant to be easy to install, easy to begin and easy to use
-Wordpress is absolutely adorable compared to what I had been working on so hard for most of my workday.
2) CMS’s data are meant to be transportable
-Now wordpress isn’t necessarilly transportable, however you can definitely export your data as a solid XML file and due to its popularity importable as well
-for my own work, its definitely obvious I won’t be accessing the data quite so soon. Exporting to XML is the easy part, importing is a completely seperate beast
3) If your going to make a user interface make you can use it again
-for me I wanted to use XSL badly, and I still do. But the complexity in automation turned an interesting idea into a beast of its own. I’ll talk about it later when I get back into it. However, the important parts isn’t the XSL but rather the HTML. css and javascript
4) Routing is one if not the most important part of a CMS
-User Permissions are based off what is asked for
-Automation is very very important when dealing with an unknown amount of objects with unknown methods
-These are two things that held me back the most
Now I can’t say I want to use wordpress, but I definitely prefer it currently over slaving away for hours inorder to give myself more hurdles. Having the requirements change, introducing new technology mid project, these are things I’ll have to deal regardless. However, to me, finishing something is far more important than making it perfect.