CMS Discussion Pros and Cons

[synth3tk]

Drupal is quickly becoming my CMS of choice. While I did love Joomla at one point, I've noticed how slow and bloated it really is after trying other systems. The article system is amazing, but ACL, for example, is lacking greatly (that is until 1.6 is released). Drupal can be very confusing at first due to its complexity, but that's also one of its stronger points. It's lightweight, fast, very customizable, and popular. Not to mention the obvious plus of it being open-sourced.

Another fun route, if you're in the mood to learn quite a bit, is to use an MVC (Model-View-Controller) system and write your own CMS. PHPCake, Symfony, CodeIgniter, etc. But that can get messy if you're not familiar with the whole concept.

[synth3tk]

By the way, using a CMS isn't cheating at all. Quite a few large companies and businesses (not to mention our own government) use CMSes. So if FIRST is preparing students and teams for the real world, then using Drupal or Joomla is right on track.

Teams such as the Adambots win the web excellence award quite often, and they're using MediaWiki as a CMS. So don't downplay the importance of a CMS. Trust me, we're a really small team too, and the functionality far outweighs winning an award.

[JohnBoucher]

There is a learning curve with any CMS, so expect to be tweaking it quite a bit. A couple of hints...

Always have a backup copy available when you are adding or testing code.

Cross browser check often.

Watch your image sizes. Photoshop has a save for web feature that will save you lots of load time. Use only the image size you need. Never scale to make it fit. The smaller the image the better. png images render better at smaller sizes.

[Bryan Herbst]

Originally Posted by synth3tk

By the way, using a CMS isn't cheating at all. Quite a few large companies and businesses (not to mention our own government) use CMSes. So if FIRST is preparing students and teams for the real world, then using Drupal or Joomla is right on track.

I couldn't agree more. As a matter of fact, I would highly encourage all teams towards using CMSs for that reason. Most companies have employees who need to be able to add content to websites, but don't necessarily know how to use HTML. Similarly, allowing such individuals to edit the files on the server could be disastrous.

I recently got a job working with a research lab on campus as an IT guy, and one of the major reasons that I was able to get that job is that I gained experience working with Drupal as I built and maintained my teams website.

If you think that using a CMS is cheating, there are plenty of ways to use a CMS and challenge yourself. Build your own custom Drupal modules or make your own theme. Both will give you something to do while providing excellent experience for the future.