Roll my own or use existing CMS (Drupal perhaps?)

Question

I need to create a internal website and can't figure out if we should be writing our own, or using an existing framework.

Most of the website will essentially be a front end to a database. We need to have a number of people enter data into forms. We then want to be able to show different views of all this data -- including running small queries (e.g. how many resources do we have with attribute 'X'). As is usually the case with this, we will want to tweak the UI on a regular basis.

There actual data design is not a simple 1:1 mapping of resource to entry. For example, we might track several attributes for one item as the "base set of data" for that item. Then we could have several additional sets of data.

Imagine a recipe application. You might have a recipse for a starter. This could then be referenced by several other recipes that need that same information.

I feel like this is best suited for a general framework (Ruby on Rails, Django, etc), but I wonder if it might not be good for a "traditional" CMS platform like Drupal? I specifically mention Drupal since the people that would develop this have the most knowledge using php and MySql.

I usually lean towards wanting to use an existing platform, but am interested in other people's thoughts. To give you an idea of scope, I would imagine if we wrote this from scratch we are probably talking about 3-5 weeks of development.

Would you recommend writing our own, or using an existing framework? If you would suggest using something that exists what would you recommend?

Would you consider this to be best suited for a straight framework or a straight CMS?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Stay away from Drupal for any site that requires customized functionality. I recently used Drupal for a website at work, and it was VERY difficult to figure out how to get it to do what I wanted it to do. There is a lot of documentation out there, but all of it is unhelpful -- it answers very specific questions about specific issues but does not provide any context as to how you would approach building the site as a whole. If you're a programmer, using a more general framework will probably work better, as CMS's are designed for a specific kind of site, and if you want your site to have non-standard functionality you are going to be fighting the system instead of working with it. If your developers are most experienced in PHP, try one of the PHP frameworks that mimics the architecture of Rails -- e.g. cakePHP or CodeIgniter.

Answer 2

CMSes usually make sense when you have a broad and potentially expanding array of different content types and modes you need to handle. Drupal has literally dozens. Given than you mentioned RoR, it sounds like what you need is more of a MVC style framework. Maybe similar to the sort of thing stackoverflow was built with. .NET an issue for you?

If you are really limited to 3-5 weeks, however, I think a Rails-based strategy makes sense so go with RoR or CodeIgniter

Answer 3

It's possible that Drupal will be a good solution for you, though you'll probably need a few key additional modules like the "Content Creation Kit" (CCK) and "Views".

Unlike other web CMS systems (WordPress, Exponent, phpNuke), Drupal treats your entries as a "pool" of content, from which you pull various subsets for different areas of your site.

There is a lot of documentation for Drupal (almost too much), the biggest problem is finding the piece that's relevant to what you're trying to achieve. Diving on to one of the interactive IRC channels can be a good idea, as the community is quite helpful and is almost always willing to give you a pointer in the right direction.

The power, flexiblity and capability of Drupal is both its biggest strength and weakness - I know it took me a bit of effort to get my head around key concepts, and I'm far from being a Drupal Expert.

One last comment: Having written my own CMS from scratch, which I abandoned in favour of Drupal, I'd suggest your 3-5 week estimate is likely on the light side.

Answer 4

If Drupal can do what you need easily I would say go with Drupal. I don't know much about Drupal though.

Otherwise, what you describe sounds like a data driven web app or more like a reporting app. It sounds like you might have some very specific needs or that users might want very specific needs in the future. That is something hard to get from premade software since you have no idea what users are going to request. Since I'm a programmer I would probably want to build it myself.

Answer 5

Funny you should ask... I just came across this in SD Time's Linkpalooza this afternoon:

Ten free powerful content management systems…

There are at least 4 more mentioned in the comments to this post.

It seems to make little sense to develop a new one with so many from which to choose!

BTW, this is neither a recommendation nor endorsement of any particular CMS.

Answer 6

Treat Drupal as a framework. Core modules + CCK + Views is a good start to build on.

If you're doing something that you might want to expose to other applications, consider the Services module. A lot of interesting things have been done with flex frontends connected to drupal running services with amfphp.