Difference between a custom build CMS and an open source CMS

Question

What is the difference between custom building a CMS website and an open source CMS?

Answer 1

Depends on what you need, how much time you have and how much coding experience you have. For example you could go and write your CMS, add only the functionality you need and keep it rather simple. But you'll have to debug it, take care of many issues like character encoding, security and you'll have to write even simple functionalities like an internal search engine. If you use something like Joomla, Wordpress or Drupal (just to mention the most popular ones), you'll have very well tested environments that have been patched for many security issues. You'll find hundreds of extensions like photo galleries, search engines, multiple language support. The drawback is that if you want to add something particular you have to spend time learning their API... but probably that would require less that coding something on your own... or may not. It's all about the complexity of what you need. You should try taking a look at one CMS API, I suggest a popular one so that you'll find plenty of examples on Google, then try to figure out how difficult it can be to learn and finally make your decision.

Answer 2

If you build the CMS yourself you have the great opportunity of going through all the problems and bugs that have already been encountered and fixed by the people the build open source CMS before. ;-)

Seriously, in my opinion, building your own CMS only makes sense if there is no open source CMS that you can customize to fit your needs. I think that you will have less trouble (and it will take less time) customizing some existing CMS.