Criteria for optimal selection of CMS and CMF

The site engine is the main platform on which the entire further project development process depends. Unfortunately, one often comes across a situation where the choice of CMS occurs for non-objective reasons: the developer is not familiar with other services, there has been no further development of the resource, etc.

It seems only at first glance that at any moment any engine can be finished and completed to fit your needs. In fact, each of them has limited functionality, which can be expanded only by editing the CMS source code, which is a great sin.

So what is really worth relying on when choosing an engine for an Internet project?

Platform knowledge

The presence of experience and knowledge of a CMS or CMF is a serious argument only for those site creators who are not very familiar with programming. Developers also have some advantages in this regard. Most of the popular engines are written in PHP, so if you know this language, then you can already deal with the basic structure of the platform.

Of course, the study of documentation and API is also a difficult process, requiring time and practice. However, it is inevitable in any case, if, of course, you do not want to be engaged all your life in creating and maintaining websites on Wordpress alone. A careful analysis of the internal CMS device will not only allow you to thoroughly learn it, but in general will improve programming skills.

Therefore, it is worth making the choice of the engine only on the grounds that it has already been possible to deal with it, unless it is very important that the delivery deadlines for the project are really important and there is really no time to learn a new platform.

Community dependency

Very often one has to deal with the opinion that the presence of a large formed community around the engine somehow characterizes its quality. Like, if Wordpress has a large Russian-speaking community, while Drupal is not so large and for the most part English-speaking, then the first engine has an advantage over the second.

Having the ability to quickly find out the answer to any interesting answer, find a ready-made solution or communicate in your own language is, of course, useful, especially when you first get acquainted with CMS. However, all this is very important only at first, then you still have to face unsolvable problems, such as excessive weight and poor scalability of the same Wordpress. In other words, after studying the engine, you still have to deal with its shortcomings, and here the community will not help.

Therefore, the advice is the same - choose a CMS with a large community only if you are critical to the speed of exploring the platform.

Project development

Any more or less large and successful project will have to scale up sooner or later. It can be either new wishes on the functionality of the resource, or a banal following new trends - the engine or its technology will become obsolete. So, making changes cannot be avoided, as well as a headache associated with their implementation.

However, a significant part of the problems can be avoided if you choose a CMS "for growth". To do this, even when developing a site concept, you need to answer the following questions:

• What is the basic functionality for the site and should be implemented first?
• What can be postponed for later and done after the release of the main version?
• What features may be needed in the long term?
• What problems can there be with the development of all necessary functions and how are they solved in the current version of CMS and its upcoming releases?
• Is the used engine and its technology relevant and for how many years will they remain so?
• How easy will it be to implement an absolutely new functionality on the selected CMS, which is not provided for in paragraphs 1-3?

Answers to these questions should be as detailed as possible, and not something like “today I will put the site on a hosting, tomorrow I will make a feedback form, in a year I will screw the forum”. It may be that, after analyzing the situation on just a few points, you will have to abandon the engine chosen initially.

Available resources

Having unlimited money, you can, of course, customize any CMS to your needs, or even write from scratch. But, as a rule, there is no such possibility. Therefore, you need to choose not an ideal engine, but one that you can buy and install on a server that can withstand the load.

With the first paragraph, everything is clear: there are paid CMS, there are free ones, it’s not so difficult to pick up something to fit your needs. But how to determine the load? There are several options:

• Analyze competitors. This will help to understand the approximate attendance of sites of similar subjects.
• If the project is new and has only a few of the same competitors that have not reached the peak of the audience, then it is necessary to study its growth rates and from this calculate the load in the short and long term.

How to determine whether the site can withstand the expected traffic? The easiest way is to conduct a stress test of the selected platform. As a rule, even commercial engines offer trial versions of their software, so they should be checked.

If there is no possibility to conduct load testing, it may help to study other projects executed on the same engine. What is their attendance? Which hoster? What tariffs does it have and which of them can this website afford? Answers to these questions will give approximate information about the CMS load on the server and the necessary configuration for the normal operation of the engine.

Total, when studying the cost of the engine and the price of maintaining its efficiency, it is worth looking for a reasonable balance in these characteristics.

Necessity and duration of support

If the project is supposed to be large-scale, then it is necessary to choose from those engines that are regularly updated for the current version, and new large-scale releases are being actively developed. It is also important that the move from the old version to the new one is as easy as possible.

If the site’s life cycle is assumed to be short-lived, just a few years, for example, then regularity and simple updates are no longer so relevant, it’s better to choose CMS by having the necessary functionality in it.

Conclusion

To choose an engine that not only allows you to make a website quickly and efficiently, but also will last long enough without any serious limitations and problems with the development, you need to take into account many factors. Do not expect that the wrong selection of CMS can be easily corrected. At best, this will force you to spend a lot of time on the transfer of content and all the functionality, at worst, it can completely lead to the closure of the project.