This is a ques­tion that comes up quite reg­u­larly for me — when do you code a cus­tom appli­ca­tion and when do you use an exist­ing solu­tion, be it an off-the-shelf prod­uct or code from an open source project? I’m sure lots of other peo­ple strug­gle with this at times too.

In gen­eral, if some­thing is avail­able that does the job and it’s in the project’s bud­get, I pre­fer not to rein­vent the wheel. I’m guess­ing that most devel­op­ment shops would have the same approach.

This came up last week — we have a quite large project that we’re plan­ning to cus­tom write in Fuse­box, using some code from pre­vi­ous Fuse­box projects. At a plan­ning meet­ing, the ques­tion was asked, “are we sure it wouldn’t be bet­ter done using Far­Cry?”

In this case we had dis­cussed this before, sev­eral times in fact. We’re really get­ting into Far­Cry, but this project would have required lots of cus­tom types and would not have made much use of the built-in types. Plus there’s not a whole lot of sta­tic pages.

Much as we’re lik­ing Far­Cry, con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems capa­ble of cater­ing to com­plex sit­u­a­tions tend to be quite com­pli­cated — and user train­ing is def­i­nitely required! In fact, we’d be hes­i­tant to roll out a Far­Cry solu­tion of any size or com­plex­ity to an organ­i­sa­tion that didn’t have their own IT sup­port staff. There’s just too much going on in it.

When we first started doing the Perth Inter­na­tional Arts Fes­ti­val in 2002, we did not know of any open source con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems that would have been suit­able — and as it’s spon­sor­ship, a com­mer­cial CMS was def­i­nitely out of the ques­tion. I’ve had peo­ple tell me we were crazy to write a cus­tom con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem — but look­ing back with the ben­e­fit of hind­sight, I still think we made the right deci­sion. The staff turnover at the Fes­ti­val from year to year, the com­plex­ity of the sys­tem and the con­stant quick changes we need to make to cater for new and unex­pected fea­tures mean that an off-the-shelf sys­tem, even one as cool as Far­Cry, would be too restrict­ing for us as devel­op­ers, and too hard to learn for the con­tent con­trib­u­tors. We’ve done some amaz­ing stuff and as I’ve pre­vi­ously men­tioned, many of the core fuses have never been mod­i­fied in four years of oper­a­tion. And believe me, it’s dead easy with sim­ple step-by-step hand-holding forms the whole way through.

On the other hand, I hear peo­ple some­times say “I’m think­ing of writ­ing my own CMS” and I just think “why?”. There’s so many out there, that unless you’re really fill­ing a niche I think you’re wast­ing your time.

What do you think? Do you have rules on when to build and when to buy? Would any­one con­sider writ­ing yet another com­plete CMS these days?