> -----Original Message----- > The question I have to answer is "Do I write everything by myself from scratch > and spend 3-6 months doing it? Or do I spend that same amount of money on a prebuilt system > and spend 1 month integrating our new branding?" The answer to this question depends heavily on your needs. What kind of functionality do you need to get out of your website? If you are looking for a website that is similar to others in function, than I would definitely suggest looking at an existing CMS package. Even if you will need some custom functionality, it may be worth the time and effort to create your own module for an existing system. But again, that depends on the complexity of the system you need. > The answer doesn't even have to be specifically one way or > the other. It could be a mixture of the two. Perhaps I use something like Drupal > (which I have no experience with) for the CMS part and write my own > ecommerce application. Or perhaps I write my own basic CMS > and purchase an ecommerce application? I would suggest that you take a look at the different CMS options as well as the community released modules / plugins. You may well find a CMS that has a module that will meet your needs, or be close enough that you could take the code and customize it to what you are looking for. > As for a CMS, I just watched a video on Drupal 4.7 and it looks quite > interesting. Opinions? I'm currently migrating from a Mambo site to Drupal. My main reason for doing so is the multi-site functionality. We have a few different websites that we maintain for different business goals, but we want them all to authenticate against the same database due to the fact that some of our users will need to use all of the sites. Using drupal it is very simple to setup several sites on one codebase, and telling them to all authenticate against the same database table is very easy. The other nice thing is that you can setup drupal to share the sessions table as well, so logging into one site logs you into all of the sites at once. Having said that, Drupal is a little more difficult to understand than some of the other CMS systems. At least it was for me, but that probably reflects more on me than on Drupal. ;) For a single site setup I would probably stick with Joomla, but that's just a preference. The bottom line is that there are lots of great CMS options, and the best way to choose one is to know exactly what you want from a CMS and compare them with that in mind. Good luck, Brady -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
