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Advice that is applicable to all development too actually... pick technologies that developers _want_ to work with.

This article doesn't pull punches, and that's good.

I've lived the problems that he talks about with PHP-based CMS products. I've also seen similar problems happen with organizations that have chosen Cold Fusion or Java CMS products, both open source and commercial.

For many organizations, the "CMS" is a bad idea. Ultimately this is because a CMS-in-a-box is trying to be everything to everybody. As a result, CMS systems are difficult to configure for the needs of an organization and often provide an interface that users find impossible. It's rare to find a CMS that doesn't have a showstopper flaw, such as configuration management problems (no simple procedure to have test and development systems) or search engine incompatibility.

His case that the "modern framework" is a better starting place is a good one, but it's also missing part of the picture. There are certain components that are difficult to implement in a correct and useful way, such as user management and commenting. The documentation for many frameworks starts with the user authentication example, but people who know web security can often spot a serious flaw in the first few lines -- never mind the stupidity of writing a new authentication system for every site you create. Symfony has a commenting plug-in which is worse than useless (it will get your site choked with spam and banned from Google in no time), and the lack of a sane method of controlling database configuration makes it impossible to maintain a site that uses symfony plugs in.

Someday "modern frameworks" will develop the ability to reuse code at the large module level: at that point, they may be able to do the job of a "CMS".

Url change due to deletion of the article by Dreamhost . http://www.hiveminds.co.uk/?p=35261