Content Management & Blogs

Hi!

Just a question. I'm pretty new to CMS's and Blogs.

And I'm experimenting with them at the moment.

My question is...in general when professional designers offer CMS as part of the website package. Do all of them write their own CMS or do some of them use OpenSource projects?

Similarly, when people have their own blogs, do they write these themselves or do they use OpenSource.

I just want to know whether to learn from scratch or to learn how to use an OpenSource of each.

Thanks very much.

Mike

It probably depends on skill level of the designer, developer. I use open source because it is a learning experience for me to make the changes to fit my needs. I assume when my coding skills are better I will try my own. I believe that is what many skilled designers do so they fit the need of particular clients.

It all depends on how complex your module is going to be. I've written a simple CMS for a few sites where you just have a row of entries, sorted by date, with a few stickies at the top; a kinda "latest news" CMS. That kind of stuff only takes 50-200 lines of code and its usually better to write it yourself. Then if you want to get more complicated then there are lots of open source modules out there, but if you use one of these you might encounter the problem that they are hard to integrate into an existing layout.