I'll list out what I see are the adv/disadv of building your own cms/ store etc. with cake, vs. delivering clients an off the shelf opensource product:
Building your own cms/store with cake has the following advantages: 1. the code base will be much smaller for the same functionality 2. once it is developed you can more easily add-on to it for future custom projects which come your way 3. it is probably less susceptable to hackers, since less eyes are on it. 4. it is easier to support as you intimately know the code 5. instead of spending time learning an open source product's codebase, you put that time into writing your own. 6. it is more enjoyable. On the other hand, it has the following disadvantages: 1. no community for the product (you are it), 2. no ready-made templates, 3. no ready made add-ons/interfaces, 4. no confidence of knowing most of the bugs are gone since thousands of users have already tripped over them and had them fixed. 5. no leverage of having an open source team issue a new release with bug fixes for you (although you must contribute back to the community once you are able, and have something worth contributing). 6. the problem of dealing with the lead time in developing your own product 7. losing contracts to your competitors who are releasing on top of ZenCart or Drupal much quicker 8. Having to explain to your clients why your $x thousand dollar product does less than drupal which they could have had installed for much less. I do not see myself ever writing a forum module if a client needs one. I would just tack on an SMF or a phpBB etc. Similiarly, if a client needs a wiki, Gallery, store, CMS or any of the other well established off the shelf open source products, I would probably just use them. It would be too hard to justify the cost of building something new, when there are so many decent ones out there. The argument of "it will be easier to support and evolve if we write it custom for you" just wont fly with the client when you tell him that extra advantage will cost a few thousand dollars and several more weeks of development. The choice is relatively easy for those clients who need all the functionality in the open source products. Use them. However, most clients do not need all that functionality. In fact, to write your own cake cms (perhaps starting with oceanCMS) or store (perhaps starting with bakesale) and build it to the point where it covers the needs of 80% of your future clients, might not be too difficult. Very few clients will need multi-site, distributed blogging, private messaging, Multi-language, publishing workflow, content version managmenet, etc. and all those other wonderful community features in drupal. For those clients which did, drupal would be perfect, and I wouldn't hesitate to use it. But, many clients simply want the ability to edit the text on their site, perhaps be able to manage categories of articles, along with user management, menu management, perhaps RSS, and that's it. That certainly doesn't require a drupal, and is not so hard to provide with cake. These are the clients for whom I am not sure whether the right move is to give them something I write myself (lean and mean without the bloat), or to give them drupal. What do people think ? Does anyone have experiences to share either way with clients? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cake PHP" group. To post to this group, send email to cake-php@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
