Considerations in choosing your CMS technology platform - is your open-source CMS acting like a proprietary system?

Definitions

Open-Source: of or relating to or being computer software for which the source code is freely available.

Content Management System (CMS): AKA web content management system (WCMS) is a software system which provides website authoring and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages to create and manage the site's content with relative ease.

In our day-to-day routine of bidding for projects, we often come across the requirement to provide our clients with a website solution with which they can maintain and update themselves.  These days we build all of our websites with this feature set in my mind by providing our site solutions built on a CMS.

Some clients even go as far as to specify that they would like an open-source CMS.  Typically the reasons for going this route is that they like the initial price tag of open-source ($0 to use) and they like the fact that they can edit the code in the future to meet their needs (a key benefit of open-source).

We typically like to educate clients with a few more reasons as to why an open-source CMS, and in particular, a popular, commonly used, open-source CMS is the way to go for their organization:

1. access to support from the development community of millions of developers
2. access to extra modules or plugins that can enhance their CMS for little to no cost
3. freedom to get development assistance from other web development companies that also specialize in the most popular projects

While there are hundreds if not thousands of open-source CMS projects freely available for download, the general consensus in the web industry is that this category is lead by "the big three", namely: Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal.  Here are a few other popular systems: http://spyrestudios.com/free-content-management-systems/

Full disclosure: Digital Echidna develops exclusively on the Drupal CMS, a popular open-source project content management framework for building complex, yet easy-to-use websites and web applications.

Occasionally in the market we see web development companies build their own CMS platform to deploy for clients. While I can only presume their motives, I believe it is fair to say the reasons would be the following:

1. they are faster in building solutions on their own platform so incur lower expenses.
2. they believe they deploy a superior CMS product than that of the "big three".
3. the solution for the client is so customized that the standard feature set of the "big three" will not be utilized to any great extent.

These of course are three very valid reasons!  

However here are a few reasons why a organization would want to steer clear of using a web development company's proprietary (regardless of the fact that it is open-source) CMS for their project:

1. by building on an open source project with a tiny support community of only a few developers, you are in fact losing the main benefits of going open-source.  Due to the fact that there is only one company in the world that works on this open-source project, offers training & support or understands how it works, the client in a sense is purchasing proprietary software, simply due to its scarcity in deployment.
2. by avoiding developing on one of the big three CMS projects, an organization will find it challenging to find other companies in their locale willing to modify or expand your sites in the future as your needs evolve. If there are willing companies, they will be doing so from a position of bidding weakness as they will be required to incur costs in order to ramp up their skills on a new CMS project - or worse yet, have to change the platform all together.
3. The power of the big three CMS' is their passionate community of millions of developers continually enhancing the product and sharing best practices on hundreds of sites and forums. You also in turn have thousands of vendors from which to choose, including many local firms, that can provide training and support - including 100's of titles on amazon.ca to assist in increasing your internal team's knowledge.

While there is no right answer in this industry, we feel the "big three" approach is in most cases the best solutions for our clients. 

If you are undertaking a web development project, we encourage you to to be certain that you know what type of CMS solution your web development company will be deploying, and we suggest asking the following questions to ensure the solution is right for your organization and not just right for the development firm:

1. how many other developers and companies contribute code to the CMS project? 
2. is the CMS product open-source? if so, where can it be downloaded?
3. for how many projects has the CMS been used and tested?
4. are there support and training material available for purchase/download? can we review them ahead of time?
5. how many other companies in our region, province and country are known to work on the CMS?

If you're comfortable with the answers to these questions than I would say you are all set for your project!