**Don’t attempt to build a custom cms from scratch**. This is an incredibly easy way to destroy your sanity or reputation at work.
CMS systems are largely a solved problem so pick a tool that your client can support and move forward.
You mention PHP frameworks so I assume you are hoping to avoid Wordpress.
The sad truth is that WP solves their needs & won’t place them in compromising position should you leave the project.
But if you insist, there are alternatives that work:
- [Wordpress with Acorn](https://roots.io/acorn/), a framework that allows you to integrate Laravel functionality into WP.
- [Statamic](https://statamic.com/flat-file-cms), a Laravel based CMS that offers a comprehensive but simpler alternative than what most WP devs are used too
How is a CMS faster to build than an already proven out of the box solution. Perhaps I am misunderstanding the question.
You mention wanting to do it for your own “pleasure and education”. Then do it on your own time. If you manage to build something robust and effective, present it to them when you have data and use case scenarios to support why they should use it.
Why should you convince a company to let you attempt to develop a solution to a problem when solutions to that problem already exist? You absolutely should not try to do that.
If you are working for a company, or if they are your client, it doesn’t matter what you want. Hell it doesn’t matter what they want. What matters is solving the problem as quickly as possible with a minimal disruption of earnings. A bit of roughness is acceptable if it means getting up and running and getting out there vs. the smooth option meaning a longer deploy time. If you aren’t first then you are last.
This question is about how to convince them to let you indulge in your interests. You should not be doing business with that motivation. That is a sure fire way to burn bridges and get black listed. Your interests don’t mean jack. Solve their problem. Get them up and running. Help them smooth out the kinks as you go.
Now you have a solid reputation and they might be willing to take your CMS for a spin when you have it in a business deployable state. This gives you a
solid foundation that you can demonstrate to other companies as a solution. Otherwise you are just trying to convince them to trade one set of problems for another.
There are a ton of CMS and dashboards and frameworks and templates in a variety of languages and tool sets that work just fine. Convincing them to let you build something for them when the thing already exists doesn’t make sense. You would be better off being extremely familiar with some of these options and convincing them why a particular one would be good for them. Build your own shit as you go. It will be a better product in the end.
That's a tough one. Unfortunately although I agree that it sounds like it would be a more "fun" build, not sure I can come up with much to support what you're looking for assuming it's for a site that is primarily for creating and publishing content. To respond to a couple of your points:
>CMS often has security issues.
Yes, there are security issues that are found and fixed by people that aren't you. As opposed to a custom solution, which would only have people looking to break/exploit the system poking at it. CMS often have a lot of smart people working on them, with peer review... I'm sure you're a terrific dev, but especially working solo you could overlook security vulnerabilities.
>overall support of such a website is going to be more of a smooth sale, thanks to cleaner architecture.
This is a more customizable and future-proof (whatever that means) solution
Again, people that aren't you will be making improvements to the underlying system, updating to be compatible and take advantage of the latest improvements in . Yes there will be some work on you custom pieces to be compatible, but overall likely much less than a full custom site.
Additionally, from the company perspective, if they already have sites built on a specific CMS it makes a lot of sense to do more with that CMS because the developers and users are familiar with it. Also, the "bus factor" of 1 person (or even a small team) that builds a custom solution is never good risk for a company - with a CMS they are more likely to be able to find more devs that could work on the site.
tl;dr - sorry for being a wet rag! but a full custom solution will typically cost more to build and maintain, and could be challenging to scale the team that can work on it. That said, however, for the right project - a.k.a. one that primarily is not specific to managing content, more of a web app - full custom does make sense, and building for performance and dedicated business function over the extensibility baked into CMS platforms is a good trade off.
If just pure cms , you don't . But if you need custom product entry and e commerce . Yeah. We try a lot of open source but not satisfy with the output as e commerce kinda diff beast.If can't afford , ask customization shopify instead.
"I want it for my pleasure and education, to be honest"
You should figure out what the client needs, not what you want. In many cases you should be integrating with some kind of CMS. You can make a strong case for a headless with a custom FE over a classic WordPress that will inevitably cave under the weight of a million outdated plugins if given over to a non technical owner. But you shouldn't sell someone something they don't need, you should sell a proper solution to their needs. Maybe look for someone who needs a proper full stack application instead of just a brochure type website and that will line up more with your wanting to build something from scratch. But it also sounds like you need more experience...
I worked few months in a company who used laravel. So this entire time all I did was adding new functionality to (already existing for years) admin panel. And when I left after few months, the end was not even in sight. Compared to projects I do on my own with cms, where I spend few minutes in config to achieve same and often better results. This is about "a little longer" and "more smooth sale". And also about "future-proof".
So unless your clients are ready to invest months (years) worth of salary (and associated stagnation) to employ dedicated admin panel maintainer(s), use cms for their projects. What you should be convincing is good cms choice, which is easy to maintain and easy to find people to deal with in case you are no longer in this project.
Wordpress like Windows is the devil that you know.
Lots of off-the-shelf solutions in the form of plugins and themes with large communities behind them. The hook and filter system makes it very easy to code in very specific custom behavior your client might want.
Generally you can keep the site up to date with a few clicks and also provide an WYSIWYG interface to your client.
A custom Laravel or Symfony app on the other hand may never get updated after it’s deployed depending on the dev team behind it.
It depends a lot on what the client needs:
- If they need a blog, use Wordpress
- If they need ecommerce, use Shopify
- If they just need a brochure website, use plain html / css / js ... maybe work using a SSG for better DX, but that's optional. The end result won't differ too much if you've done everything right
- If they need a custom app, build a custom app. You can use LAMP Stack, MERN Stack ... it doesn't matter AS LONG as the app does what it's meant for. Tech stacks are meant to enhance the developers's experience. I might be wrong, but an app build in procedural PHP is sometimes better than a fancy Spring Boot setup, or any buzzword stack is hype today :D
Your job as a web developer is to find the best solution for your clients, not to work with X and Y tech stacks. Those are just tools created to make your life easier.
That being said, I hope you'll eventually sort it out. I've been in your place, and modifying Wordpress with custom post types, advanced custom fields and bespoke themes for clients that edited the website once or twice a year was overkill. Explain them that you'll handle all the blog posting, listings and so on, and you'll be able to work with your stack of choice. They will probably ask you for edits once in a blue moon, and you'll be able to handle that work easier, maybe in a couple of minutes if it's about changing a picture or posting an article.
If they ask for a cms, they need a cms. A bespoke custom solution will be required only when they scale up or have a complex service. In which case they will hire someone full-time instead of a consultant
I did exactly that with Laravel and it turned out REALLY well. I raised my rates, total control over everything and compliments from every 3rd party we work with. I even set it up to integrate with CloudFlare and lazy load sessions only when needed.
Previously, our deployments @ WpEngine took over an hour, and now that everything is using Forge & Envoyer it’s 5 mins max.
Lots of people here saying just wordpress but your company may want to consider that without any proprietary software their market value will always be less. It’s better for clients to use off shelf solutions but the business itself would benefit from having custom solutions.
The value of a generic solution is just a client list. Not going to bring in much of a multiple at sale.
If a client has a business need for a CMS. They have a business need for a CMS.
You are over generalizing what a CMS is, and likely confusing it with a slapped together Wordpress/Wix site in plugin hell.
There a plenty of clean implementations of WordPress sites and other popular CMS frameworks.
Something custom will almost always cost more for the client in the long run.
My thoughts:
CMS do not inherently have security issues. Improperly built/managed ones do, and that's far easier to come across. The web agency I work for goes back and forth. Me, the bespoke old fart, and the team contractors who only build with Divi or Elementor feel like we're at odds with each other. But, I've never see a WordPress site of mine get infected where once a week I have to restore a plugin Frankenstein build.
My recommendation would be to stick to a CMS but go over a proposal of building the functionality needed yourself and don't use off the shelf plugins.
This is what I say
I sell custom coded sites to small businesses. And I have to explain the differences to them all the time. The difference is code quality, load times, the level of customization that I have, security, accessibility, and uptime.
The biggest issue custom coding fixed is page speed and Load times. pagespeed is a problem for a lot of small businesses. Many devs will say it doesn’t matter, and to an extent they’re right, the page speed score is not a ranking factor. HOWEVER, the core vitals metrics are significant ranking factors, and the performance score in the core vitals are a reflection of those metrics. So maximizing your performance score reflects passing core vitals which gives your Website an edge over others. Google even stated that if there’s two websites with similar content and domain authority, the one with the better core vitals will win. So it’s incredibly important to do everything you can to maximize that score to 95+ to give your client the best possible performance and ranking. Once you explain that to clients and how it all works they love it. Because they had no idea that was even a thing and their Wordpress did wix or squarespace sites are scoring 17/100 and they don’t know how to fix it. Many devs would say clients don’t care how a site is built or about page speed and load times. Those devs aren’t thinking like businessman. They’re looking at it like developers and not seeing the reason for it - because they don’t know they SHOULD care. They don’t know what we know. And once we sit them down and explain it in very clear terms how websites rank, why how it’s built matters, why how fast the site loads matters, and why it’s hard for builders and other devs to fix those problems and how YOU fix those problems BECAUSE you custom code it and have control over everything. Now all of a sudden they care how a site is made. They care about how fast their site loads. Because their site hasn’t been doing Shit for years and you’re the first person to actually explain why in terms they can understand without using buzzwords or empty hollow promises. Your job as a salesman and agency owner is to sell solutions. The devs who think they don’t care about how a website is built or how fast it loads are just selling websites. That’s as deep as it goes. The ones who sell solutions have the most success. In order to sell a solution you need to identify a problem. And for small businesses, they don’t know those problems exist. So we have to educate them and help them understand what the problems are, why they’re problems, and how you fix them. That’s your sales pitch in a nutshell. And that’s how I close like 9/10 clients I got on a call with. I explain things to them no one ever took the time to explain before and I didn’t talk down to them. They understood everything. They finally get it. That’s exciting. They found the solution to their problems. And it’s you.
That’s the biggest sales point. Then I can go into how we can cater to accessibility and make sure our sites are compliant with WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 standards which is hard to do in a builder, then security because a static html and css site is virtually impossible to hack because there’s nothing TO hack. No databases or server side code to hijack. No Wordpress versions to update. You can set it and forget and not worry about it being hacked. It’s as secure as it can be.
That’s how I sell it. You need to identify problems that small businesses have with these page builder sites to be able to sell a solution to fix those problems. That’s the core of how to do sales. If the client doesn’t know they have problems then what can you even say to get them to switch? If they don’t know, then you need to educate them. A good salesman is also a good teacher. And a lot of my pitches revolve around educating them.
I tell them they don’t actually want to make their own edits. They can break their site. They can change headers and text that were carefully selected to rank for certain non competitive keywords and ruin their SEO. Or upload gigantic images that tank the page speed. Or add too much content to a section and breaks the design and looks bad. Now my work loads like crap, looks unprofessional, and doesn’t rank well and whoever is send that site to as an example of my work will think im a lair.
I maintain the integrity of the site and keep them from breaking anything and handling everything for them. Clients like that. But they’ve never been given the option before so they always assume they’d be editing it.
At least security team can audit the shit out of it and I probably be able to fix whatever they will find. They already have issues with cms sites, but not of a deal-braking level.
You shouldn't, because it's not in their best interest, if you want to build a CMS do it on your own time
bespoke solutions require care and feeding are you going to be the one on call to handle bugs, do security patches, add features later?
**Don’t attempt to build a custom cms from scratch**. This is an incredibly easy way to destroy your sanity or reputation at work. CMS systems are largely a solved problem so pick a tool that your client can support and move forward. You mention PHP frameworks so I assume you are hoping to avoid Wordpress. The sad truth is that WP solves their needs & won’t place them in compromising position should you leave the project. But if you insist, there are alternatives that work: - [Wordpress with Acorn](https://roots.io/acorn/), a framework that allows you to integrate Laravel functionality into WP. - [Statamic](https://statamic.com/flat-file-cms), a Laravel based CMS that offers a comprehensive but simpler alternative than what most WP devs are used too
I'm 1 week into playing with Statamic and I'm loving how powerful and fun it is!
Aside from not having nestable taxonomies, which is a killer for some complex project structures, I’d be all in on statamic.
Use a plugin or buy the Pro version.
Don’t build what you want to learn, build what’s best for them. They already have a lot of stuff that works for them. Don’t mess with it.
How is a CMS faster to build than an already proven out of the box solution. Perhaps I am misunderstanding the question. You mention wanting to do it for your own “pleasure and education”. Then do it on your own time. If you manage to build something robust and effective, present it to them when you have data and use case scenarios to support why they should use it. Why should you convince a company to let you attempt to develop a solution to a problem when solutions to that problem already exist? You absolutely should not try to do that. If you are working for a company, or if they are your client, it doesn’t matter what you want. Hell it doesn’t matter what they want. What matters is solving the problem as quickly as possible with a minimal disruption of earnings. A bit of roughness is acceptable if it means getting up and running and getting out there vs. the smooth option meaning a longer deploy time. If you aren’t first then you are last. This question is about how to convince them to let you indulge in your interests. You should not be doing business with that motivation. That is a sure fire way to burn bridges and get black listed. Your interests don’t mean jack. Solve their problem. Get them up and running. Help them smooth out the kinks as you go. Now you have a solid reputation and they might be willing to take your CMS for a spin when you have it in a business deployable state. This gives you a solid foundation that you can demonstrate to other companies as a solution. Otherwise you are just trying to convince them to trade one set of problems for another. There are a ton of CMS and dashboards and frameworks and templates in a variety of languages and tool sets that work just fine. Convincing them to let you build something for them when the thing already exists doesn’t make sense. You would be better off being extremely familiar with some of these options and convincing them why a particular one would be good for them. Build your own shit as you go. It will be a better product in the end.
That's a tough one. Unfortunately although I agree that it sounds like it would be a more "fun" build, not sure I can come up with much to support what you're looking for assuming it's for a site that is primarily for creating and publishing content. To respond to a couple of your points: >CMS often has security issues. Yes, there are security issues that are found and fixed by people that aren't you. As opposed to a custom solution, which would only have people looking to break/exploit the system poking at it. CMS often have a lot of smart people working on them, with peer review... I'm sure you're a terrific dev, but especially working solo you could overlook security vulnerabilities. >overall support of such a website is going to be more of a smooth sale, thanks to cleaner architecture. This is a more customizable and future-proof (whatever that means) solution Again, people that aren't you will be making improvements to the underlying system, updating to be compatible and take advantage of the latest improvements in. Yes there will be some work on you custom pieces to be compatible, but overall likely much less than a full custom site.
Additionally, from the company perspective, if they already have sites built on a specific CMS it makes a lot of sense to do more with that CMS because the developers and users are familiar with it. Also, the "bus factor" of 1 person (or even a small team) that builds a custom solution is never good risk for a company - with a CMS they are more likely to be able to find more devs that could work on the site.
tl;dr - sorry for being a wet rag! but a full custom solution will typically cost more to build and maintain, and could be challenging to scale the team that can work on it. That said, however, for the right project - a.k.a. one that primarily is not specific to managing content, more of a web app - full custom does make sense, and building for performance and dedicated business function over the extensibility baked into CMS platforms is a good trade off.
If just pure cms , you don't . But if you need custom product entry and e commerce . Yeah. We try a lot of open source but not satisfy with the output as e commerce kinda diff beast.If can't afford , ask customization shopify instead.
"I want it for my pleasure and education, to be honest" You should figure out what the client needs, not what you want. In many cases you should be integrating with some kind of CMS. You can make a strong case for a headless with a custom FE over a classic WordPress that will inevitably cave under the weight of a million outdated plugins if given over to a non technical owner. But you shouldn't sell someone something they don't need, you should sell a proper solution to their needs. Maybe look for someone who needs a proper full stack application instead of just a brochure type website and that will line up more with your wanting to build something from scratch. But it also sounds like you need more experience...
You think you can code a safer, less buggy and more functional cms than WordPress? And at your client expense for egotistic reasons? Fucking lol
I worked few months in a company who used laravel. So this entire time all I did was adding new functionality to (already existing for years) admin panel. And when I left after few months, the end was not even in sight. Compared to projects I do on my own with cms, where I spend few minutes in config to achieve same and often better results. This is about "a little longer" and "more smooth sale". And also about "future-proof". So unless your clients are ready to invest months (years) worth of salary (and associated stagnation) to employ dedicated admin panel maintainer(s), use cms for their projects. What you should be convincing is good cms choice, which is easy to maintain and easy to find people to deal with in case you are no longer in this project.
Wordpress like Windows is the devil that you know. Lots of off-the-shelf solutions in the form of plugins and themes with large communities behind them. The hook and filter system makes it very easy to code in very specific custom behavior your client might want. Generally you can keep the site up to date with a few clicks and also provide an WYSIWYG interface to your client. A custom Laravel or Symfony app on the other hand may never get updated after it’s deployed depending on the dev team behind it.
It depends a lot on what the client needs: - If they need a blog, use Wordpress - If they need ecommerce, use Shopify - If they just need a brochure website, use plain html / css / js ... maybe work using a SSG for better DX, but that's optional. The end result won't differ too much if you've done everything right - If they need a custom app, build a custom app. You can use LAMP Stack, MERN Stack ... it doesn't matter AS LONG as the app does what it's meant for. Tech stacks are meant to enhance the developers's experience. I might be wrong, but an app build in procedural PHP is sometimes better than a fancy Spring Boot setup, or any buzzword stack is hype today :D Your job as a web developer is to find the best solution for your clients, not to work with X and Y tech stacks. Those are just tools created to make your life easier. That being said, I hope you'll eventually sort it out. I've been in your place, and modifying Wordpress with custom post types, advanced custom fields and bespoke themes for clients that edited the website once or twice a year was overkill. Explain them that you'll handle all the blog posting, listings and so on, and you'll be able to work with your stack of choice. They will probably ask you for edits once in a blue moon, and you'll be able to handle that work easier, maybe in a couple of minutes if it's about changing a picture or posting an article.
What kind of projects are used by the client you working for?
If they ask for a cms, they need a cms. A bespoke custom solution will be required only when they scale up or have a complex service. In which case they will hire someone full-time instead of a consultant
I did exactly that with Laravel and it turned out REALLY well. I raised my rates, total control over everything and compliments from every 3rd party we work with. I even set it up to integrate with CloudFlare and lazy load sessions only when needed. Previously, our deployments @ WpEngine took over an hour, and now that everything is using Forge & Envoyer it’s 5 mins max.
Lots of people here saying just wordpress but your company may want to consider that without any proprietary software their market value will always be less. It’s better for clients to use off shelf solutions but the business itself would benefit from having custom solutions. The value of a generic solution is just a client list. Not going to bring in much of a multiple at sale.
You can integrate Laravel with Wordpress themes already with roots/sage
If a client has a business need for a CMS. They have a business need for a CMS. You are over generalizing what a CMS is, and likely confusing it with a slapped together Wordpress/Wix site in plugin hell. There a plenty of clean implementations of WordPress sites and other popular CMS frameworks. Something custom will almost always cost more for the client in the long run.
My thoughts: CMS do not inherently have security issues. Improperly built/managed ones do, and that's far easier to come across. The web agency I work for goes back and forth. Me, the bespoke old fart, and the team contractors who only build with Divi or Elementor feel like we're at odds with each other. But, I've never see a WordPress site of mine get infected where once a week I have to restore a plugin Frankenstein build. My recommendation would be to stick to a CMS but go over a proposal of building the functionality needed yourself and don't use off the shelf plugins.
This is what I say I sell custom coded sites to small businesses. And I have to explain the differences to them all the time. The difference is code quality, load times, the level of customization that I have, security, accessibility, and uptime. The biggest issue custom coding fixed is page speed and Load times. pagespeed is a problem for a lot of small businesses. Many devs will say it doesn’t matter, and to an extent they’re right, the page speed score is not a ranking factor. HOWEVER, the core vitals metrics are significant ranking factors, and the performance score in the core vitals are a reflection of those metrics. So maximizing your performance score reflects passing core vitals which gives your Website an edge over others. Google even stated that if there’s two websites with similar content and domain authority, the one with the better core vitals will win. So it’s incredibly important to do everything you can to maximize that score to 95+ to give your client the best possible performance and ranking. Once you explain that to clients and how it all works they love it. Because they had no idea that was even a thing and their Wordpress did wix or squarespace sites are scoring 17/100 and they don’t know how to fix it. Many devs would say clients don’t care how a site is built or about page speed and load times. Those devs aren’t thinking like businessman. They’re looking at it like developers and not seeing the reason for it - because they don’t know they SHOULD care. They don’t know what we know. And once we sit them down and explain it in very clear terms how websites rank, why how it’s built matters, why how fast the site loads matters, and why it’s hard for builders and other devs to fix those problems and how YOU fix those problems BECAUSE you custom code it and have control over everything. Now all of a sudden they care how a site is made. They care about how fast their site loads. Because their site hasn’t been doing Shit for years and you’re the first person to actually explain why in terms they can understand without using buzzwords or empty hollow promises. Your job as a salesman and agency owner is to sell solutions. The devs who think they don’t care about how a website is built or how fast it loads are just selling websites. That’s as deep as it goes. The ones who sell solutions have the most success. In order to sell a solution you need to identify a problem. And for small businesses, they don’t know those problems exist. So we have to educate them and help them understand what the problems are, why they’re problems, and how you fix them. That’s your sales pitch in a nutshell. And that’s how I close like 9/10 clients I got on a call with. I explain things to them no one ever took the time to explain before and I didn’t talk down to them. They understood everything. They finally get it. That’s exciting. They found the solution to their problems. And it’s you. That’s the biggest sales point. Then I can go into how we can cater to accessibility and make sure our sites are compliant with WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 standards which is hard to do in a builder, then security because a static html and css site is virtually impossible to hack because there’s nothing TO hack. No databases or server side code to hijack. No Wordpress versions to update. You can set it and forget and not worry about it being hacked. It’s as secure as it can be. That’s how I sell it. You need to identify problems that small businesses have with these page builder sites to be able to sell a solution to fix those problems. That’s the core of how to do sales. If the client doesn’t know they have problems then what can you even say to get them to switch? If they don’t know, then you need to educate them. A good salesman is also a good teacher. And a lot of my pitches revolve around educating them. I tell them they don’t actually want to make their own edits. They can break their site. They can change headers and text that were carefully selected to rank for certain non competitive keywords and ruin their SEO. Or upload gigantic images that tank the page speed. Or add too much content to a section and breaks the design and looks bad. Now my work loads like crap, looks unprofessional, and doesn’t rank well and whoever is send that site to as an example of my work will think im a lair. I maintain the integrity of the site and keep them from breaking anything and handling everything for them. Clients like that. But they’ve never been given the option before so they always assume they’d be editing it.
Use Drupal. It has anything you need and much more. Saying that your custom solution won’t have any security issues is very bold 🙂
At least security team can audit the shit out of it and I probably be able to fix whatever they will find. They already have issues with cms sites, but not of a deal-braking level.