CMS: Build or Buy? [closed]

Question

This question is a little subjective, however, it aims to give me a bit of information about whether it is better to build or buy.

My company is looking to enter the world of CMSs for our clients websites, do we provide an open source one, or do we build our own model from scratch?

If you buy, which do you use?

If you build, how does your architecture differ?

EDIT: The CMS we are looking to use isn't to maintain our own website, it is something we can offer our clients and pinned onto websites we are custom building for them, it needs to be something that we adapt and manipulate easily for many different website designs and purposes.

Answer 1

How about using opensource one? :-)

Today the only reasons to develop new CMS are:

1) non-usual requirements (deadly rare)

2) You just like to code "your own CMS" (c)

If none is the case, take opensource one.

Personally, I have my own CMS for all my private & commercial purposes, but this was mostly just for programming fun. If you need to deliver, you have to use existing products.

Answer 2

The company I work for wrestled with this same question recently. This depends a lot on your client's expertise and needs. It's generally not advisable to build your own CMS unless you're using it to offer something very novel.

Drupal has lots of plugins available giving a great deal of customizability. It's handy in the same way that most CMSs are in that you can use PHP files as your templates and code them outside of the CMS.

Wordpress has the best user interface of all the CMS's I've used (Drupal, EE, Wordpress, Joomla). If you need to program plugins it's also very well documented and (when the plugin is finished) provides a drag-and-drop interface for the client to make changes to their own web site easily.

I'm currently in the process of moving our site from EE to WP.