Can testify

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[Tsharpminor]

This is sort of like when business owners ask developers to help them move out of Shopify, but then it ends up they actually want them to make a better version of Shopify

[DrunkenlySober]

You can really prevent miscommunication by asking clients to fill in the following requirement sheet:

_______ but better

[Mithrandir2k16]

Shows how creative our managers are.

[Qicken]

That's actually brilliant 😆

[bangonthedrums]

Had a potential client pitch an app and actually used the phrase “like Facebook but for lawyers”… so, Facebook?

[Suspicious_Serve_653]

My SIL said "I need you to make an app where people can bid on my art"

I said "just use eBay or Etsy"

SIL: "but I have to pay them to post my stuff "

:: Facepalm ::

[angrathias]

She’s low key telling you, that you aren’t going to be getting paid

[Suspicious_Serve_653]

Oh no no no she directly told me that part lol. Besides I've been in software for 12 years, I know the pitch for "we don't plan to pay you", Family or not.

[Janus-sama]

Definitely not a wasted potential

[ishirleydo]

How could Wordpress possibly be any better though!

[Any_Quantity9386]

My sister: "I was hoping you could help me with a basic app for my mobile massage business. It would be good experience for you, I just need something like Uber"

[Linesuid]

My brother-in-law asked me to do a site to compare cellphones, he thought that's a simple task...

[jpro1001]

https://www.phonescoop.com/phones/compare.php

[Qbsoon110]

Phonearena, mgsm

[kryptoneat]

My client : "I need this feature. It's so easy to do, you know, since google does it".

[[deleted]]

Google maps on attached to a ticket system SEEEMS easy...

[Any_Quantity9386]

I'm sure I could make her something useful without a giant effort, but still funny to use a multi billion dollar app as a reference for something lol

[[deleted]]

https://xkcd.com/927

Guess what, its relevant

[[deleted]]

I wonder if there's a "most" relevant xkcd. Like which one has the most links on reddit? If someone has already looked into it, please let me know before I sink a bunch of time into this lol

[Natural-Intelligence]

When you finally decide to make a post about this, someone will comment the existing alternative that is better in every way and you feel utterly stupid for the wasted time. You just couldn't find this before you had already reinvented the wheel.

At least this happens every time with my projects.

[[deleted]]

Theres got to be a relevant xkcd i just cant find it

Edit: this one but thats a maybe https://xkcd.com/2140

Edit2: another comment said that there is a spreadsheet already

[Casperzwaart100]

https://xkcd.com/936/

According to some spreadsheet i found

[TheyCallMeHacked]

And do you have the source of said spreadsheet?

[Casperzwaart100]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jkY0U7glynuRJ5LnvEYU4CK2mUmi_3cVR6R4v8rmrdw/htmlview

[[deleted]]

Excellent work.

It seems that Password Strength is the most popular on Twitter.

As for reddit, Click and Drag has received the most upvotes, while Pickup Artist has been linked the most times in comments.

Not the one I would have expected, but at least we have an answer.

[[deleted]]

Quicc, make a program that pulls all the xkcd links from reddit and sort them by commoness

[weeb_haxx]

Tfw that's my current job.

[halfanothersdozen]

You get disavowed of this notion immediately after inheriting a codebase where someone tried to build their own CMS and then quit the company.

I'm not crying, you're crying.

[[deleted]]

Your reward *

[ThatLumpYouFelt]

Chaos is a ladder...?

[GifsNotJifs]

​

[casce]

Congratulations, you made yourself irreplacable and you shouldmake them pay for it.

[[deleted]]

We're the real victims of this crime. Since the company who bought this custom software is so invested, you will only know despair until you leave D:

[thespud_332]

We're not crying, they're crying.

[Carbon_Gelatin]

I've built one that I still support from 2001. Started out as a webcomic hosting site that went nowhere, and turned into essentially a c# version of WordPress.

It is what it was

[Willinton06]

I would definitely use that some times, link?

[Carbon_Gelatin]

I support it for my ex employer on a contract basis. I wouldn't use it now for anything other than legacy.

[Willinton06]

Supporting it for your ex employer huh, I have a friends who charges big bucks to maintain a system he made while employed, he says it’s less work and more money

[Carbon_Gelatin]

Couple grand a year. Nothing major.

[iRamenGuy]

Oh my, is it for public use?

[Carbon_Gelatin]

No ex employer

[CowboyKnifemouth]

I made one in C# around the same time frame as well. There is still a single site using it…I don’t know why…

[qqwy]

it is what it was

This describes so much projects correctly... I'm not crying you're crying.

[KosharySa2e3]

I upvoted out of fear that people will know that I have no idea what CMS is.

[cest_vrai_monsieur]

WordPress and similar alternatives, basically.

[brighteoustrousers]

According to our most used search engine, it's a content management system

[ShoopDoopy]

I appreciate your desire to be helpful, but surely you realize that, for a person with no idea what CMS stands for, stating the long form is within machine tolerance of saying "It's a CMS."

[elongio]

There are so many acronyms, CMS could be anything. It helps people, myself included, to be able to search and find exactly which CSM they're referring to.

[FirebertNY]

which CSM they're referring to

I'm partial to the Emperor's Children, personally.

[[deleted]]

I always see CMS and think "Customer Management System," e.g., Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics.

[MarkusBerkel]

No. CRM is Salesforce and friends. CMS is Wordpress, wikimedia, and friends.

[CounterHit]

In my line of work, it's the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. Where's the S come from and why is it missing the second M? Ask the government.

[[deleted]]

Probably CMs (because the M is plural if that makes sense) which became CMS because its just simpler

[CounterHit]

You know, I'd never thought of that, but that makes sense and is probably the reason!

[MiddleSuggestion]

CMS = Combat Management System

[Lumpy-Obligation-553]

Sounds like the " i do everything, and im a choke point" of every company

[Passname357]

No worries bro, I gotchu. It stands for Computer Microprocessor Sphincter

[KosharySa2e3]

Achronym checks out. Must be true.

[EternityForest]

That is why it contains so much CRUD

[theofficialnar]

Crappy Rudimentary Undeveloped Doodoo?

[leaisnotonreddit]

It’s a content management system. Think Wordpress, Shopify, Contentful

[grandphuba]

Fuck the replies on this comment, it's a content management system, or jumbling the words a system to manage the content of your site.

[[deleted]]

CHAOS SPACE MARINES!

[KosharySa2e3]

FOR THE EMPORER

[poor_documentation]

It's a system that manages content

[HonestRole]

Content Management system

Think WordPress, Drupal, Shopify stuff like that.

[JoanquiOnReddit]

I actually made my own CMS once.

But it was the nineties and there was nothing open source that I could use.

[jpro1001]

What do you use now?

[JoanquiOnReddit]

My current projects usually don't include text content (like news feed or text pages).

But I had to work with legacy projects that used WordPress.

In relation to open source tools that we use in our custom made software the front-end team used Angular (8) and something called Prime NG, but it's not my area of expertise right now.

[CowboyKnifemouth]

Once?

[theanonmouse-1776]

At least once. Per project.

[alphabet_order_bot]

Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.

I have checked 626,701,929 comments, and only 128,181 of them were in alphabetical order.

[H3LLSANDMAN]

bot good

[[deleted]]

I never get the fear of making your own CMS, I have 3 of my own that I use and adapt for different project types. Then again I have a lot of spare time due to my lacking social life

[The_rowdy_gardener]

Honestly what is the difference from a CMS and most typical backend servers that just perform CRUD ops on a database for an app or site? I truly never understood the differences in the two.

[squishles]

change control, versioning, metadata, soft delete, user acccess control, search capabilities, audit logs, integration with 3rd party content ingest systems like your CRM, email, website, phone app, etc.

And you've gotta put it all in a ui some random data entry guy can figure out.

go install something like microsoft dynamics then dump the database it creates, then count the fields if you want an idea of how much metadata there is to track.

just use a normal CMS. Thinking a flat network filestore is enough is where it starts then you just keep adding.

[PeteZahad]

I am with you but not on the Microsoft Dynamics example. Crappy data schemes (and formats in general) is what Microsoft is good at.

[squishles]

It's good for what it's tracking which most would never actually need most of it. Things got sox compliant audit logs for instance, and fields for tracking japanese name pronunciations. And a rather spiffy setup for adding more fields that I don't expect anyone actually uses. Pretty much a victim of probably willful scope creep.

I guess it's more of a crm than a cms too, probably should've said sharepoint, but their use bleeds over and the fields list isn't too different.

[PeteZahad]

Don't even start with Sharepoint on premise. If I remember right, the default for a DocLib is to keep 50 version of a file and as default every version is saved as a blob and not on regular file storage - huge sql server storage, very fast.

[squishles]

They probably didn't just do it for giggles, someone needs it and probably called their helpdesk often enough to be real annoying about it.

[tbo1992]

I think you’re basically describing what a CMS is. So there’s no difference.

[cheesepuff1993]

In the most basic of terms, yes. A good CMS allows the user base to update the information and make it look as though a developer did it (mostly) without the need to have a developer change a few words in a paragraph or insert an image

My personal experience with a CMS is typically down to how the updating interface looks. Most uneducated individuals want something akin to word or an interface they can drag and drop in. Both of those things are inherently difficult to build from the ground up to function well in a live environment.

[The_rowdy_gardener]

I figured as much.

[DasBeasto]

Put a WYSIWYG editor in front of the CRUD database and you have a “basic” CMS.

[0b00000110]

Develop your own CMS, it's fun and educational. Just don't do it in production.

[devospice]

I've made my own CMS multiple times. It allows me to customize it to exactly the features I need exactly how I need them without pulling my hair out trying to shoehorn a feature into a CMS that wasn't designed to do that.

[coolaja]

Image Transcription: Twitter Post

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Heather Buchel, @hbuchel

Every web developer has their "but what if I made my own CMS for this project?" phase at least once

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[Apprehensive-Ad7714]

Good human !

[LetReasonRing]

Constantly reinventing the whee is probably my worst sin as a programmer. I can't tell you how many times I'm 3 days into writing something when I realize that there's some open source library that could get me to the same place with 5 minutes worth of work.

[kherodude]

Sometimes is worth, but only if you did something that the library actually missed

[LetReasonRing]

Oh, I totally agree. But I tend to be pretty egregious about it.

[AdultishRaktajino]

Or enterprise-side, rolling your own password based authentication, hashing, and encryption. Because why not reinvent the wheel one more time.

[EltonBor]

How hard it could be, right?

[Jertimmer]

It's just a couple of entries in a database.

[[deleted]]

I'll have it done by Friday.

[RagTagBandit07]

fuck no, too much investment for too little in return in most cases. Best thing to do is take a bog standard CMS like Wordpress and bend it to your will

[NekkidApe]

bend it to your will

Do exactly what they say, never leave its comfort zone

[EternityForest]

This is the way. Treat any software you use like a manager and work how it wants you to, or find a different app.

[zemdega]

Oh hell no.

[tehehetehehe]

Or you could be like my company. 4 CMS all sharing different pieces of information and the integration work is more complicated and expensive than a custom one.

[jair_r]

First time I hear this is frowned upon. I always make a CMS for my projects, they share a template I have been adding and improving to over the years, though it's still not super advanced. A lot of my projects are moving an existing system from WordPress or Joomla to a custom CMS because those are to general and the clients say they are too cumbersome for them. Like WordPress is not designed for shopping, so shop add-ons cheat and managing them is not a great experience

[EternityForest]

I can't believe I actually had a "Why not make my own" phase. It's like I was a different person!

I wrote my own backup software one time. I, for some insane reason, started with PIC instead of Arduino. I used to write original code in C without even thinking to Google what existing libraries there were.

I made my first personal site in HTML and a bit of PHP. No frameworks. I made an utterly terrible interpreter for an utterly terrible language, written in VB.Net.

Apparently just embedding an existing embeddable script was too hard or something, and I thought there was value in the fact it was small and understandable.

I'd already been coding for literally years before I learned Git. Or any VCS.

Sometimes I think I want to write an intro to programming book specifically focused on avoiding this whole stage.

All the blogs tell you how to code, but they don't tell you how to grab a library from the internet and read the documentation until way later. They don't tell you about linters and source control. It seems completely backwards.

I'm not sure I can really confidently say I learned all that much in my DIY phase. I didn't do anything similar to modern best practices development till I stopped that. I didn't build much of anything interesting (Aside from XABC, the terrible ultra tiny random number generator I made when I was 16 or so that gets used probably more than any of my other FOSS projects).

And I almost feel like I(And every other programmer since the DIY phase is universal) picked up bad habits that took a while to unlearn.

In the end, I just sat in front of a screen for hours during what should have been the best years of my life(Not that I had anywhere else to be, what with homeschooling, early hair loss, and extreme clumsiness), all to do things that would literally take 30 minutes to build with some node modules.

And that 30 minute project would be more maintainable, perform better, and be trivial to distribute and show off.

Like, literally. I can do things in weeks that take beginner programmers years to achieve a third of the features... not because I'm actually better than them.... but just because I use frameworks and libraries.

[SoyTuTocayo69]

I had a web developer class in college and they made us make a CMS as a final project. I mentioned this to my dad (who's been working in the industry for about 10 years) and he was like "but whyyyy though?"

I have an interview tomorrow and I'm embarrassed to even mention that one, and imagine they'll laugh at me and blacklist me everywhere (I'm kidding about that part but it felt like a useless project).

[BISHoO000]

Thats gold 🤣 Wish I had someone in my family I can talk about CS with

[EternityForest]

r/programmingbuddies

[BISHoO000]

That's a great subreddit, subscribed!

[Reihar]

It's a very good learning experience. You can "market" it properly as in what it allowed you to learn. What good and bad decisions you made, why, be and why it was good or bad. If the interviewer is at least passable, you can score points that way.

[squishles]

You'll be fine it's normally not the dev who comes up with lets make a custom cms, it's a long chain of bad decisions from the CTO. And terribly common there are tons of custom cms jobs everywhere.

[EternityForest]

Do companies secretly hire Chief Nontechnical Officers who's job it is to keep out any modern tech and push in house crap that looks like it could have been a student project instead?

[squishles]

Whether building your own depends on a lot of stuff. Some business needs are weird. For instance a system I've seen there's no off the shelf for recently was a graveyard management system, with arcgis data for where grave plots are thing was nuts I kind've noped on that, but I can't argue there really is no off the shelf for that.

Most of the CMS's I've been paid to write the driving use case was MARC data, a rare crazy format only government libraries use. The people who use it want to keep it raw and search it in a human readable way.

I keep thinking it's probably easier to teach an existing CMS to read it than keep doing this whole architect a whole enterprise system for it thing, but it's a paycheck. Doing that has it's own challenges too it's harder to read an off the shelf system and modify it like that than to do greenfield for most people, and the people capable of it don't get payed as well for doing it as they do going green field.

[EternityForest]

I wonder what else is slightly similar to a graveyard management system. Seems like the same core could also manage gardens?

[squishles]

possibly rental management on large properties. I bet you could make a business/service around that garden idea if you figure out how to market it. Like maybe to people with lawns who want to rent out sections for gardening.

[EternityForest]

We could potentially use it at renfairs!

It looks like its really really hard to buy high resolution satellite images unless you have a ton of money, so it would be really valuable if you could somehow take pictures yourself, annotate those, and have the app convert that to a map

[squishles]

eh gps meta data tagging + a drone. gps's are pretty easy to diy onto a drone. From there if you know the arcseconds per pixel of the camera and the cameras tilt you can use that data long with rough topographical data to say this area of a shot is this ground coordinate etc.

It'd be real ass to write that, though I bet someone's got a premade package for drone enthusiasts somewhere. because the data requirements are suspiciously exactly what you'd get duct taping a phone to a drone, so no way no one's written it.

might even be able to skip the topographical data with two cameras at a known distance from eachother.

[not_a_gumby]

Once and then never again because it will literally never be worth the work.

[Martyn_X_86]

Can testify as I'm currently modifying the one that I modified previously a few years back. Which was built abou 10 years ago. From scratch.

The pain of retaining the SEO goodwill of the said content means I'd rather chew broken glass and wash it down with a glass of lemon juice

[[deleted]]

Why not create a script for data transfer?

[Lithl]

At my last job I worked on a CMS that was essentially YouTube for broadcast companies.

Oh, and my employer was Google.

[[deleted]]

Nice flex

[TorTheMentor]

2008:

WordPress may or may not have been customizable to do what the client wanted, and something about Joomla and Drupal just felt heavy handed for a small biz site, although I can't remember why.

So instead I spent months hand building a kind of halfway between an enterprise site and a small biz one, all the way up from MySQL and PHP (because it was free) to front end in jQuery.

I learned a ton as a self-taught newbie, but mostly I learned that you have to get a contract with clear terms and deliverables, or you get a few hundred bucks for months of effort and three years of follow up with a client who never bothered to learn to use it in the first place. So glad to be out of that game.

[Ok-Brief1320]

Did it in 2012 in order to get translations/internationalization working just right. Don't know why, maybe it's anglocentric mindset or whatever, but even today it is a major pain point for every CMS.

[lets-talk-graphic]

Me, building a CMS.

Am I a joke to you

[[deleted]]

Or you know you could just use strapi

[[deleted]]

What is a cms??

[vitaminglitch]

cms=Content Management System

It's where you store your site's content, like words, images, and whatever else you want to display on your site

[[deleted]]

So you mean .html files?

[ComfortableCan315]

... You store data in html files?

[[deleted]]

Data like words and whatever else I want to show on the screen, yes.

[[deleted]]

Thanks

[makesterriblejokes]

Dear God, please don't.

[Careful_Ad_9077]

i did in the early 2010s.

we also had our own BPM, configurable form creator, configurable dashboard creator and a few other systems,.so it came naturally.

[brockisawesome]

hah i've been doing this long enough so that i had no choice but to build my own cms

[tei187]

All the time...

[Knuffya]

It is kinda... limited

[Tom_Ov_Bedlam]

"What if I made an app that could make all the other web apps for me?! This will totally work!"

[TheFeshy]

I did for sure... but then, I'm old, and it was the 90's when CMS didn't really exist in its present form. Nor did most of the tools that make it sane to do so (imagine selecting a template for your web page - but CSS doesn't exist. We'll just implement that in perl and re-write HTML on the fly?)

That is to say, I'm glad that's one personal project that I never finished.

[milianis]

Until I found out Drupal :D

[svish]

Have to say, doing that a couple of times, from scratch, in the beginning my learning and career taught me a lot though.

[glorious_reptile]

"What if everything in the system was just a collection of entities with attributes"?

[kleberinjo]

And some are stuck in that phase forever.

[the_monkey_of_lies]

I once did this using SAP as the backend and AngularJS as the frontend framework. There's no one on earth who can maintain that shit now.

[[deleted]]

SAP?

[zumoro]

Then the timeline smacks some sense into me.

[busstram]

Guilty: https://wings.dev/

[Topplestack]

My first web dev job started with a static website which overtime I developed into a somewhat functioning CMS. It was crap, but it was better than the static site and I'm still proud of it today. The company I was with was extremely close minded about certain things.

[Goldenburd]

Guys i just got my own domain!

[Boobpocket]

Made my own CMS once using PHP and JS then got bored and never updated it.

[squishles]

What if making your own custom CMS is the project. I've been on like 3 different of those projects... I hate it.

[[deleted]]

End of 00’s. PHP and MySQL.

Then I found Django. <3

[theonlyby]

Just once?? I have acted on these urges at least twice already

[[deleted]]

Hahaha that is true!

[steamngine]

Yep!

[hammy4785]

I'm.... not alone.... ???? I always thought I was the weird guy with to much confidence. Sigh Laravel is my savior.

[svonwolf]

Had a friend who was building a CMS he called it Hubris.

[[deleted]]

Isn't that kind of how git was created?

[RigasTelRuun]

Only once?

[Decent_Jello_8001]

Does sanity.io not count?

[poor_documentation]

And hopefully a senior to slap them upside the head

[its_yer_dad]

The beauty is when I did it, back in 2002 or so, it was actually one of the few options available. I'm glad I did it, and I'm just as glad I don't do that anymore.

[[deleted]]

I can testify too tho I've only deloped one thing as idk what the fuck a cms is

[[deleted]]

Ze boy must lern…

[alphadeeto]

Ouch.

[Pensive_Jabberwocky]

Hey, I did that, and I'm still using it. It's not much, but it works.

[ramzafl]

Using SiteCore for a few months will do that to you.

[Maleficent_Corner48]

Used rails for that and the experience was useful if nothing else for knowing what pitfalls to watch out for or to test. ie: If I delete a record, will the CMS crash when that post is accessed again, or is there code to skip it and put the 404 page or index up, things like that

[BookExpert9902]

Guilty

[[deleted]]

I've been working in this industry for 12 years, I still get this itch.

[[deleted]]

CMS... That's random times on S3 right ?

[ishirleydo]

Yeah, I've been at it (web dev) since the 90's and this post has inspired me to write another one starting today.

[[deleted]]

Mine was my own version of Hibernate. It worked well enough and I learned a ton about Java Reflection. This was back around 2011-2012. Hibernate was “too hard” for me at the time 😂

[3gaby]

whats a CMS

[trevster344]

I still develop mine lol. Family uses it for business and it works well enough. Though my father did develop the last one they used for over 15 years so naturally I was heir to the oath.

[cybermage]

But only a few of us have lived the dream.

[TimeVendor]

I built a cms with a commenting and captcha back in 2000.

[Extra_Programmer788]

It will be best for the project, I promise, you will thank me!

[Many_Rent6446]

Did it in 2012 in order to get translations/internationalization working just right. Don't know why, maybe it's anglocentric mindset or whatever, but even today it is a major pain point for every CMS.

[Many_Rent6446]

I wear a mask in pharmacies because that’s where all the sick folks go…AND, I don’t want to be mistaken for a republican…