PHP Nuke

[colt527]

I have always hated PHP-Nuke (please dont confuse me hating the program with me hating teams that use the program), I like to make everything my way. On my here I built my own CMS, which works very well for our purposes and is completly customizable because I wrote it. I can make it do whatever I want, which is much more powerful than any pre-made CMS. I also do not like the design of many pre-build CMS's ... I think it is in fact getting old, when I look at a site, I dont want to be BATTERED with tons of information ... words filling the entire screen. I want space for my eyes to wander, to look be pulled into the website. When I see a site with words all over and links to every think on everyside everywhere, I'm discouraged to look at it all. The over crowded look is out in my opinion.

What I really like to see in a site, is a design that flows, everything seems seemlessly connected. I view webdesign as a form of art that combines computer graphics with inforation like no other form of media can, and when the combination is perfect it really draws you in to read the site and take in the information available to you. With most CMSs and their premade cookie-cutter layouts, this is not accomplished. So from just a design stand point, I would discourage teams from using pre-made CMS.

After that nice long preface, here are my opinions on some of the points brought up:

I think all of you have some very big misconceptions about FIRST. Winning the robot part of the competition is not about learning or doing unneccesary work. It works just like "winning" in industry. You are given a goal with some simple restrictions. That's it. No one really cares how you get it done, just the fact that you get it done. If I can make a website based on a free CMS and make a more functional, content-rich, and aesthetically pleasing website, why should it matter?

Designing and maintaining a custom made CMS and knowing how to write internal scripts for a site, is just as big of a deal as making the design functional and pleasing to the eye. If you know the inner workings of you own CMS, then you can adapt your system to better suit your content and the way you post your content. If you worked at a highly user-interactable site company, you would need to make the inner workings of your site as efficient as possible! Also, my usual argument, someone had to write the pre-made CMS, someone has to learn how to write the pre-made CMS's of the future.

Again, if you can't build a site better than a phpnuke template, you have a long way to go my friend.

I stated my opinion on most pre-made CMS designs, I think the perfect website, has the functionality of a CMS, but looks like it is a normal site. .. And yes some of the phpnuke templates are very lame


Ok, i'm tired of typing, maybe i'll post more later