[theforum] Can't get on steering, finance or sysadmin

[Judah McAuley]

William Anderson wrote:

> Martin Paul Burns wrote:
> 
>> Paul wrote on 23/05/2004 00:01:20:
>> >I agree that using what we have or an off-the-shelf solution might be
>> >quicker in the short run, but I think in the long run it would be easier
>> >to have a custom-built system.
>>
>> No, because then you end up with a system that only 3 people in the world
>> understand enough to do any work on. This is generally referred to as the
>> 'under the bus' scenario.
> 
> 
> Absolutely agree - if we are to switch CMS in the near/far future, 
> coding one up from scratch is utter lunacy.
> 

I've been writing CMS' for several years now, starting long before they 
were popular. I've written ones with fexible roles based security, 
workflow, versioning, etc. I've got 5 or 6 years of CF coding under my 
belt and probably know .jeff's coding style better than anyone in evolt. 
You would think that would make me the biggest supporter of forging 
ahead with a new version of the custom CMS done in CF, that extends what 
we have now.

That would be entirely wrong though. Maintaining custom code, not 
leveraging the work of others in the open source community, sticking 
yourself with high licensing costs for the application server...these 
things are completely unnecessary in this day and age. I still love 
working in CF, but you can sure as heck bet that I've been learning PHP. 
I still do some custom CMS type things but I've also done my first 
Drupal work and now that Plone 2.0 is released, that's next on my list.

Martin is completely right, a lot of the hairy problems that all CMS' 
run into have been solved. If we choose a system with flexibility and an 
open API we can concentrate on doing just the work that is honestly 
custom to Evolt. We don't have to code another login system. We don't 
need to write another file upload utility. There are a lot more 
interesting problems out there and the best way to get at them is to 
leverage what already exists and then extend it further. To paraphrase 
Newton, the only reason I have seen further is because I have stood on 
the shoulders of giants.

So count me as one CF/Sql Server/Win2K boy who votes for Plone under 
Debian :)

Judah