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[pscocoa]

Have used the same guy for 10 years on our corporate site. Our system is old written with Pearl which is no longer supported. We used him to do a full spec for our new system but now the problem - he is looking to develop a new Content Management System (CMS) I think when our requirements are not that heavy in many respects.

We have relied on him too much as when I ask about other already existing CMS's that might do the job he pours cold water on the lot. I am no expert on this but try and ask the right questions.

Found someone who has a number of sites which we like the look of - he works in Adobe Cold Fusion and hosts the sites accordingly with hosting companies that will support Cold Fusion.

Are we going down a dead end with this option?

[TheBoy]

I think Cold Fusion is a bit of a dead end now as well.

LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) and MS (ASP.NET and MS-SQL) seem to be what powers the web now.

Browse round a few sites, look at the page tech, and see the popularity. PHP pages end in .php, ASP(.NET) are .asp or .aspx, Coldfusion is .cfm

[Kevin Wood]

Sounds like he's quoting for what he wants to develop not what you need... and Perl is still very much alive and kicking as a language, but if he's written reams of code specific to your site, and doesn't want to support it any more, getting someone else to pick it up and work with it might not be cost-effective!

The cynic in me is thinking that he wants to develop a CMS, and later re-sell it, or services hosted using it, and you're being asked to foot the development costs, but maybe I'm being unkind.

There are probably plenty of off-the-shelf CMSs, many freely available, which would host your site with little to no modification. Most are probably coded in PHP and can be hosted by LAMP or Microsoft platforms and, if you pick a popular one, there'll be plenty of consultants around who can be employed to support it in future. As said, ColdFusion is not something to be recommended these days. Ask around a few other places and see what they are working with, then pick the most popular, assuming you're happy with the end results that can be achieved.

[Rods2]

Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress are the most popular PHP CMS systems. Drupal is the most comprehensive, followed by Joomla and finally Wordpress. Ease of use is pretty much the reverse of complexity, but less complexity means more limitations. Not that that will be an issue with 99.9% of users.

Unless it is a very specific / specialized / high security website then I can't see why he is not using an off the shelf system. If he wants to stick to Perl there are a number of CMS packages. All three of the PHP CMS systems are free under the GPL licence and their are a raft of other PHP CMS packages out there as well. Unless you have a new set of requirements that you website can't currently cope with, why do you need to upgrade your CMS?

For most people I can't see the point of going the Microsoft route as it is more expensive. For multinationals that need global multi-language websites, then the Microsoft route might be slightly better, where they have better commercial support and better support for unicode, if your website needs to cover many of the world's languages.

This list gives you an idea of the number of CMS systems about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems

Finally here is a review of Drupal v Joomla v Wordpress

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9219685/Site_builder_shootout_Drupal_vs._Joomla_vs._WordPress?taxonomyId=169&pageNumber=1

[pscocoa]

To Kevin - unfortunately I think you are spot on with the building of a new CMS at our expense.

To Rods2 - the current guy hosts the site and tells us that it is at risk, no longer able to support and would be difficult to compile certain aspects of code to facilitate a migration.

I will look at the exchange of messages with him again tomorrow but the language he is using is becoming unnecessarily more and more techie to reinforce his perception of complexity.

Unfortunately the Cold Fusion guy is talking very sensibly with evidence of sites in our business area which seem to be doing the job. My staff like his approach as well but as said we are web users not developers/ designers.

[Kevin Wood]

I've used Drupal and Wordpress. Both free, both have good support forums, both can be used to get a basic site up within minutes and adding more active content like e-commerce, forums and the like is straightforward. You will come across the odd thing that doesn't work out of the box and you will also no doubt need to customise it for some of your needs and develop a theme that matches your company "brand". For these you'll need someone who knows the CMS very well. The beauty of them is that once you've gone through that, daily tasks like updating the content, adding new products, etc. Is a breeze that you can easily handle yourself, calling on the "expert" only when you hit issues.

[pscocoa]

I note and appreciate all the views but if those interested could take a look at the Cold Fusion development plan on Youtube and see if their views on dead end remain the same please - thanks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cY44HzPwMBE#at=46

[Rods2]

I note and appreciate all the views but if those interested could take a look at the Cold Fusion development plan on Youtube and see if their views on dead end remain the same please - thanks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cY44HzPwMBE#at=46

The problem of using a proprietary system with a small user base is will it do now and what you can reasonably expect to want to do in the future. Because, if it won't then you either have expensive development costs to pay for extensions or plugins or you will have to move to another system again, with all of the expenses and disruption this causes. Where popular system, especially open-source software CMS systems have a multitude of plugins so there is probably a free addition that will fulfil your requirements, if the core system doesn't. I would suggest you read this wikipedia page on Adobe as the company has been heavily criticised, for their pricing practices, large unjustified price increases, unfixed bugs and security vulnerabilities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Systems The reason why Cold Fusion has never got a big market share has been the cost of the software compared to the free PHP / MySQL market leader and the free products based on this. The open source companies have business models that generate income by providing professional tools and support that those that need it and donations from grateful users. Many universities add to the code base of the open source software community through research projects and many people within companies and as private individuals develop software and make it available to the development community as free plugins and additions.

Choosing your development system is a bit like choosing between an Apple or Android phone who are the market leaders and have the greatest range of Apps and a Windows or Blackberry phone that don't. Now if the Microsoft or Blackberry apps available cover all that you want to do on the phone fine, but for the majority of smartphone users there will either be gaps as those particular facilities just aren't available or much lower featured / poorer quality are all that are available. For many app providers it is just not worth spending the development costs to put them on the low market share phones compared to investing that in improvements of the market leaders and the same applies in the software development market.

It is well worth reading the Drupal v Joomla v Wordpress review just to see the problems the developer had, the additional modules he installed for the additional features and the ease that he did this. As speed of development equates to development cost, likewise the cost of the tools and and subscription based update programs will be passed on to you.

A big change that is happening at the moment in the web development is making table / smartphone user experience much better. I was at a presentation today for a insurance comparison website and about 25% of their enquiries and sales are through smartphones and tablets, by 2015 they expect this will be 50% or more. So, you need to look at who, where and why are people using and going to use your website over its expected lifespan and how are you going to cater for those needs. At the end of the day a website is there for three purposes: To provide information to customers, to generate sales leads or sales. For all businesses this combination is unique, which is why you see so many different styles and types of website.

My suggestion would be to write a specification based on who your current customers are, who you hope your future ones will be and how your new website can improve your current customer experience and how it will attract new customers. Then you need to think about how are those customers going to find your website and this can be through traditional marketing that contains your web address as well as search engine optimization (SEO) and web advertisement like pay-per-click (PPC) and whether it is appropriate to your requirements and finally how can you make social media in conjunction with your website help with your marketing. Next, how do you expect to get a return on this investment (ROI). Now all of these sorts of questions you would be asking to justify a traditional advertising or PR campaign and so you should with what is essentially an 'electronic' advertising and marketing campaign. You will be spending money, so make it work for you.

Once you have a specification, why not use it to get three competitive quotes with illustrations of what they have interpreted as the style you are looking for. This may well produce a clear leader for your business.

I hope this is of help and I not teaching you to suck eggs.

[pscocoa]

Thanks Rods2 - definitely not teaching me to suck eggs so very much appreciated.

I am trying to pin down the guy we have relied on for years and we have a discussion planned for today. He does not want to build the new CMS at our expense as first thought so will have to bottom out why he is not being more proactive on finding 2 or 3 potential CMS resources to quote against the detailed spec he has written with/for us.

Thanks again.

[TheBoy]

Another reason for going with mainstream is that virtually all the usualy exploits, such as SQL injection, would have been sorted out, and those that are discovered are fixed very quickly.

The flip side is that the thicker of the hackers - script kiddies - will know about published flaws and use off the shelf tools to try to exploit them, so you need to keep fully patched.

But believe me, any field on any webpage is targetted by automatic robots looking for SQL injection. It clearly ends up on a suckers style list, as if vulnerable, you get a massive wave of attacks. I tend to write my own CMS, but thats more because I like to keep my hand in on the coding side.

[TheBoy]

so will have to bottom out why he is not being more proactive on finding 2 or 3 potential CMS resources to quote against the detailed spec he has written with/for us.

My bro has a web developer for his business website. It seems to be me doing the running around finding which package to use, as it seems his designer has no ability to understand/compare what is out there.

That says, also seems to be me pissing around with the javascript as well. I bloody hate javascript. Did I mention I hate javascript?

[pscocoa]

so will have to bottom out why he is not being more proactive on finding 2 or 3 potential CMS resources to quote against the detailed spec he has written with/for us.

My bro has a web developer for his business website. It seems to be me doing the running around finding which package to use, as it seems his designer has no ability to understand/compare what is out there.

That says, also seems to be me pissing around with the javascript as well. I bloody hate javascript. Did I mention I hate javascript?

I think this is broadly where we are with our designer.

[Rods2]

so will have to bottom out why he is not being more proactive on finding 2 or 3 potential CMS resources to quote against the detailed spec he has written with/for us.

My bro has a web developer for his business website. It seems to be me doing the running around finding which package to use, as it seems his designer has no ability to understand/compare what is out there.

That says, also seems to be me pissing around with the javascript as well. I bloody hate javascript. Did I mention I hate javascript?

What the problem with one minor typo stopping the whole program from working. 

Using a browser's JavaScript debugging window certainly helps in cutting to the chase in finding and fixing the bugs quickly. One of the nasty bugs, normally when cutting and pasting form HTML fields is having two fields with the same name where you missed changing one of the input fields names as you generally get no browser console error message, the Javascript form checking just stops working, but after 12 years of using JavaScript I'm wise to this one. 

[TheBoy]

I think you failed to grasp quite how much I hate javascript. Did I mention I hate javascript? I bloody hate it

Try and do anything clever, get it working in 1 browser, but not in another. So fix that, and it breaks a 3rd.

I bloody hate javascript

[Rods2]

Now you are touching on a subject of hate for me, browser incompatibilities and implementation bugs.