Who uses a CMS to manage their sites?
Anyone run an open source cms to manage their startup's site? What do you guys use? Drupal? Joomla? something else? any huge downsides to running a cms and not going from scratch?
All of them suck so bad they make me want to kick someone.
If I were starting today, I'd probably choose Drupal, but I'm sure I'd live to regret that as well. The smart money is probably on picking a "good enough" implementation of all of the individual features you need, and then make them all share session, and then write a custom login and user management page or two. You shouldn't imagine that any of them is a cohesive set of tools with a standardized codebase using a common set of functions.
That's pretty much what our Joomla site ended up being, only with the added pain of having to manage all of the content through Joomla (which is atrocious...give me flat files over that any day). So, I've spent months learning this big pile of code only to end up using it as a glorified session and authentication handler--the more I use the "native" Joomla tools, the less I like them. And it forces horrible URLs onto you unless you build a custom URL mapper for every application and use one of the SEF tools.
Admittedly, I'm not a fan of PHP, and so my discomfort is increased by working in a language that makes me feel a little ill (no first class functions? how does that even happen in a modern language?)...but nonetheless, the more work I do with websites like this, the more I think content management systems are a bad idea unless you're using them for the very, very, very specific set of problems the developer first set out to solve (I can't figure out what that is for Joomla, since it's so painful to use for just about anything, including managing content, but I'm sure there's a core of useful functionality in there that the project was first started to provide).
I'm going to try Drupal for a community site I'm planning for our Open Source tools, but I may end up giving up on that. It's just hard to know how painful things are going to be until you have users banging on it, and you have to dig deep to address problems they find. It wasn't until we'd actually launched our new site that all of the bugs in Joomla, Fireboard, Flyspray (mainly the bridge), VirtueMart, and other components came to light. Many still remain...If I knock out one bug a week, I'm pretty happy (the system is big, and the bugs run deep). Note also, that all of those apps have their own stylesheets and templates--you aren't even getting cohesive styling, unless you build the templates to match for every single application.
My ideal would be if every application out there had a very simple authentication callback interface, so you could tell it to get the session state from anywhere (maybe OpenID will make this a reality). It'd make it so easy to build a full-featured website--and no big over-arching framework needed. You could even use different languages for your apps...
A CMS is good to get you kick started, after all who wants to build another boring login script? But if you are serious about your app, I think you have to roll your own. Simply because with any set of code provided for general use, it will never fit perfectly to your needs. And I think it is that extra bit of perfection, the 'icing on the cake' that makes your app special and stand out. It is much harder to accomplish that using someone else's code than writing your own specifically for your own purposes.
Cal Henderson in his excellent book 'Building Scalable Websites' mentions writing his own file transfer protocol for a middle-ware file storage system. His reason was that it was custom made for Flickr's needs and thus was faster than anything available.
A quote I heard somewhere about Catering Fake, when asked what tools she recommended to build a web app, she responded 'PHP' (in other words, she suggested using no tools, and to build your own).