CMS vs Ground Up Hand Coding

[bhDesign]

Does anybody know where the web design industry is heading? The question for me is CMS versus good old-fashioned hand coding. I love manually typing my HTML and PHP scripts and I think I do a pretty good job but Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress…, ect seem to produce some pretty cool sites. Is hand coding going the way of cassette decks and CD players? Or is there room for both.

[felgall]

They serve two entirely different purposes.

It is somewhat like when planes were created if you were to ask if that meant that boats would no longer be required.

[Jolly]

The question for me is CMS versus good old-fashioned hand coding.... Or is there room for both.

I don't know where the web design industry is heading but I do know which way I'm going.

I think there is a third way which makes good use of your coding time, but allows you to benefit from the efficiency of the CMS. What I mean is that if you do all of your hand coding via a CMS template or theme, you only have to do it once per site or once per update.

I use Wordpress which allows me to get pages on the web fast and also allows me to modify themes using hand coding. Then I use wget to download a static copy of the site which ends up making Wordpress redundant. End result it a bunch of static pages exactly as it I had hand coded them all - i.e. low server load and super fast site. But only a single set of theme templates to modify (as long as I made sure I set up my Wordpress structure how I wanted it the first time with .html extension on pages, and my chosen category structure so that wget pulls down a clean and efficient set of files.)

[charlesgan]

open source cms is good for 90% of the user.
its helping many to get a website running, without really know how to code in html.

the future definately will heading to 'application' instead of development. Developer will focus on development, but end user won't.

just IMHO.

[redsox9]

The benefit of CMS is that end users do not need to have an understanding of HTML, PHP, etc.. The disadvantage is that having this understanding reduces the number of headaches associated with the frustration of getting a site to work as expected.

That being said, the better CMS software packages, which includes Wordpress, have made it so that the only challenge for the end user is selecting a design template you like without having to think about the backend code. Most of these are free but even paying for a template should run you no more than $50 to $100 for a high-end template that allows for greater flexibility. Widgets add even greater flexibility.

It all depends on whether you want to spend time developing your site or let the site develop itself...

[dophinsluv]

I like the analogy of an engine and the mechanic that builds or fine tunes it. It probably will work nicely out of the box and the average user should never have to look at it. This is true with Wordpress, Drupal, or etc.

However, if you want something really high performance or specialized you'll need to make modifications or build it yourself. You'll need to know the html, php, and mySQML code to do that.

So, if you want a car, you can go buy one off the shelf. If you want to race it, you'll have to make some modifications to the engine. If you want a rocket, you'll have to build it yourself from scratch.

In any case, even if you want just the car. You probably need to know something about how it works so you can keep it running nicely. ;)