Should you build a custom CMS for your site?

When it comes to building a website, there are some features that are so unique to your site that you think building a custom content management platform may be the way to go. Our panel of experts at Oshyn's Tech Mornings: Content Management event discuss whether they think creating your own unique CMS makes sense for your business.

Video Transcript:

Audience Member: “Quick question, with all the CMS platforms out there, does it ever come a point the user requirements are still so unique that it makes more sense to create a custom CMS?”

Kristine Stebbins, Filter:  “I can take it from a very simplistic perspective.  I would say never, honestly. Really with the packages that are out there today, they are so powerful. Unless there’s tremendous amount of maybe legacy data or, you know, very proprietary systems that you have a situation in your business that there’s no way your company ever going to want to move away from particular set of technologies or processes that must be adhere to and there’s absolutely no way you can integrate with the others. I mean, there are always unique situations for sure but the tools that are out there are pretty robust whether it’s a combination of tools or integration layers of what have you.  That’s my point of view.

Jose Caballer, The Skool: “You have a different point of view…”

Mark Buchheim, TMZ:  “No, I have the same point of view as Kristine. If the CMS doesn’t handle everything, you’ll find that the CMS that gets you to a certain point and hopefully it provides the API or application programing interface so you can develop your own widget that fits the specific use case.”

Christian Burne, Oshyn: “I say we fell into that trap about 8 years ago. But now, if your system is actually an application, you know, if there’s screens that are application-driven, lots of functionality, lots of data being pulled from back end systems, then you are really building an application - a web application. And there could be components of that web application that have content managed. But then your answer is ok, well those pieces of that application that need to be content managed there’s easily a handful of tools, a handful of CMS’s, that act more like embedded inside of an application and just mange a specific pieces of content within an application and your sort of choosing a different CMS essentially. And maybe your system is 70% application and only 30% managed content but for that 30% …and your problem then isn’t what CMS to choose. Your problem is really how do I build a custom web application but for that 30% you can use a specific tool to help you handle that 30%.”