Yoo-hoo, are you out there somewhere?

When I sell a web site system to a client, I like to be clear on the fact that what I’m selling them is not a closed-source proprietary solution. I think this is important for everyone but especially for non-profit organisations. Too many times I’ve helped out an organisation whose domain name and hosting are inaccessible to them – they are locked into a system with one developer, typically at a large cost, and have no way of changing hosting, changing developers, or getting their data out without starting from scratch. In the worst case one group couldn’t even update their site and the developer was not answering the phone.

Some people might look at that and think that it’s smart business on the part of the developer – but in my view, it’s an outdated way of thinking. Your customers should be coming back to you because they’ve always gotten great service and they love what you’ve done for them. If you’re not looking after them anymore then they deserve better.

Anyhow, what this comes back to is that one of the systems we push for larger, more complex sites is FarCry. A few times people have called me out on my statement that there are developers actively working with the system all over the world and ask for examples – and usually they are only interested in Australia. I can point to a few obvious ones – Daemon themselves, for example, and a few other organisations I’ve worked with in Perth – but I figure there must be many more that I simply don’t know about.

Sharing this information about where the developers actually are can only benefit the entire community, in my view. I actually think this is information that should be published on the FarCry web site. But we can start by outing individual companies, I think.

I’m happy to share the list I compile with anyone who wants it and I’ll even publish it here if no one on it objects. So leave a comment or send me an email – kay@smoljak.com. I know you’re out there!

Posted from kay lives here

Where are all the FarCry developers?

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?

Posted from kay lives here

Custom-coded vs. off-the-shelf

Mike Wall from Curtin Business School is a regular at the WA CFUG, so he’s given us all an insider’s perspective of the project as it panned out. By the sounds of it, the FarCry part at least was amazingly smooth and painless. Kudos to Mike and to Daemon.

Posted from kay lives here

Curtin FarCry case study