Content Management System – Is creating one viable?

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Mar 282005
 

A friend of mine was telling about creating a commercial Content Management System is a good way to go. Then I was asking myself, why would I want to pay for a CMS which is so expensive, when I can get a CMS which costs $0, has online support, and many resources on how to set the system up.

One of them is the Mambo CMS created using PHP and MySQL which all runs on Apache. Here’s a recent review on it.

Open source Mambo CMS succeeds admirably

All these are free. Another one of them is the DotNetNuke created using Visual Basic.NET and runs on IIS which isn’t much of a CMS but there are modules to convert it into a CMS which can also interface with MySQL. The same goes with PHPNuke.

Just do a google search for “Content Management System Opensource” and you’ll get back so many results. So now I ask you, why should I spend time creating my own, and selling it? One way to make money from CMS would be to take one of these Opensource free CMS, and provide the service of customising it for the client. It’s much faster, reduces cost, and it’s already easy and ready to use.

Now I want your opinion on this.

What’s the rationale for creating your own CMS? Even if the rationale is that CMS is meant for big enterprise-level businesses, and most SME aren’t really taking for it, as previously mentioned, there is the niche market there to push into. But why would I want to spend time creating a CMS from scratch, then customising it, then selling it?

And why should I as a businessman want to buy the CMS from Microsoft when it’s so complicated, difficult to setup, and most of all, EXPENSIVE? Integration is one thing, but that’s all I can see as the advantage, which I don’t quite need really for CMS.

Comments please. :)

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  • Stephan H. Wissel

    There is no point building another CMS for the market (Ektron has a niche commercial one). However you might build one expecially for a customer to suite their special needs.
    So building a CMS can be fun (focus on the user processes!!!!) if you are paid for. An investive development (a.k.a. pay yourself and hope on a sale) is a waste of time.

  • Stephan H. Wissel

    … customizing one is also fun.

  • triplez

    Exactly! There’s no point building another one. Customizing one specific for a customer’s needs would have more value in it, BUT the thing is, isn’t that what everyone is doing?

    Bah, glad you agree with me. I don’t quite see the point in going into CMS.