Choosing a CMS over CI?

[eluser]andjules[/eluser]
I'll add my 2¢ as a lover of both CI and Drupal.

If a client comes to you and needs a basic site, powered by a CMS, I don’t even know why you would turn to CI when there are so many feature-rich and mature PHP-based CMSs.

98.5% true. The only exception is if your client has a big wallet, you are forced to charge by the hour and you desperately want your client to be completely dependent on you. In which case you want to take as many hours as possible to re-invent the wheel... and take care that you don't comment or organize your code, so it becomes ridiculously expensive for them to have other suppliers try to modify your work. This strategy has worked wonders for some big agencies.

Drupal’s presentation layer is completely separate from the application. There is no design that is off limits with Drupal. A lot of people are lazy about fully implementing a theme, so a lot of Drupal defaults are used instead. This is a fault of developers, not the framework.

True in theory; less so in practice. Drupal gives you hooks to style everything; but they are very verbose hooks (lots of extra DIVs and ridiculously-fine-grained CSS class names) that impose a not-insignificant learning curve. Even then, part of the strength of Drupal is the amazing range of functionality available through community-developed plugins, many of which are much harder to style/control output.

- - -
Bottom line:

1) It's not fair to your client to continually roll-your-own CMS unless there is something simultaneously very 'custom' and lightweight about their needs
2) Drupal is overkill for a basic CMS (pages/sections/navigation); it's learning curve isn't worth it. If you like custom coding in a MVC framework like CI, check out silverstripe.
3) If you need to build something solid with a lot of social or media or integrated functionality (a social portal with user-defined groups, facebook-like relationships, user-blogging, youtube functionality, content versioning, internal messaging and 20 different kinds of user-privileges....), dive in to Drupal - you'll live a longer, healthier life, and your client will save a lot of time & money (once they get over the ugly admin UI).

[eluser]Colin Williams[/eluser]

Drupal gives you hooks to style everything; but they are very verbose hooks (lots of extra DIVs and ridiculously-fine-grained CSS class names)

No, no, no. Drupal gives you ability to change the markup for any module. There's no such thing as HTML embedded in the application logic. You can choose to use as many DIVs and classes as you want. For instance, the core template for a block is

Code:

<div class="block block-&lt;?php print $block->module ?&gt;" id="block-&lt;?php print $block->module ?&gt;-&lt;?php print $block->delta ?&gt;">
  <h2>&lt;?php print $block->subject ?&gt;</h2>
  <div class="content">
    &lt;?php print $block->content ?&gt;
  </div>
</div>

But you can easily rewrite it to

Code:

<div class="&lt;?php print $block->module ?&gt;-block">
  <h2>&lt;?php print $block->subject ?&gt;</h2>
  &lt;?php print $block->content ?&gt;
</div>

once they get over the ugly admin UI

Hrm.. I'll give you that. But again, it can be changed however you need. Likely in less time than rolling your own.

[eluser]andjules[/eluser]
true enough... but in a way reinforces my conclusion. The sheer depth of capabilities/flexibility means the learning curve & configuration effort is significant... not worth it for simple features.
Drupal seems easy & clear to you (and to a lesser extent, me) because we probably invested 50+ hours of research, reading, concept-absorption, and quirk-learning. Simpler CMSs demand less investment (textpattern is a good example).

[eluser]Colin Williams[/eluser]
I get your point and agree to it. The thing we should stress, and I think we have stressed, is that using CI to patch together a rough CMS is typically not the wisest, most responsible or most ethical thing to do. I think the decision to do so is usually a little ego mixed in with a little inexperience and garnished with cynicism. Maybe that's harsh...

[eluser]Stefan :: cleverleap.com[/eluser]
Try http://demo.typevista.com, it is build on CI so you get power of both CI and integrated content management system.

[eluser]Colin Williams[/eluser]
Drew Wilson was building his CMS Firerift on CI and it looked promising. Now he's touting a JS framework called Titan as the engine driving it. Not sure what role CI plays any more. http://www.firerift.com/

[eluser]Ben Lilley[/eluser]
My first thought on this is that I would never be rolling my own CMS using CI, it just doesn't make sense unless the client is requesting something that needs to be custom built, and even then I would use another CMS as a base.

This is why I can't wait for ExpressionEngine 2 — if everything goes as planned having that CMS to build off which is completely powered by CI will be huge. I just love the idea to be able to roll out EE to take care of the basic CMS stuff and add then add any extra functionality using the CI code base. Isn't this everyones dream?

I'm surprised nobody is really mentioning this.

[eluser]Kyle Short[/eluser]
[quote author="andjules" date="1239913123"]I'll add my 2¢ as a lover of both CI and Drupal.

- - -
Bottom line:

1) It's not fair to your client to continually roll-your-own CMS unless there is something simultaneously very 'custom' and lightweight about their needs
2) Drupal is overkill for a basic CMS (pages/sections/navigation); it's learning curve isn't worth it. If you like custom coding in a MVC framework like CI, check out silverstripe.
3) If you need to build something solid with a lot of social or media or integrated functionality (a social portal with user-defined groups, facebook-like relationships, user-blogging, youtube functionality, content versioning, internal messaging and 20 different kinds of user-privileges....), dive in to Drupal - you'll live a longer, healthier life, and your client will save a lot of time & money (once they get over the ugly admin UI).

So true...after having implemented a few large Drupal sites I can say that Drupal simply isn't worth it unless you need to build a large, featured rich community oriented site. For a simple+ site I would go with EE (or possibly other PHP-based CMSs...my rules:

1. You need user generated content on a social site = DRUPAL
2. You need a data driven web site that is easily managed = EXPRESSION ENGINE
3. You need a custom database driven web application = CODEIGNITER

[eluser]Sonolin[/eluser]
This thread inspired me to learn more about Drupal yesterday.

Just yesterday, in maybe 4 hours, I set up a Drupal website on my local wamp server, installed a bunch of interesting modules (such as expanding the basic Drupal forum with the advanced_forum module, CCK, and more I can't think of at the top of my head) and worked through the 6.x module creation tutorial in the Drupal documentation. I must say I am very very impressed by Drupal! Here everybody is touting this as something difficult to get into - but it is FAR from that.

Sure, the API is huge. Drupal is definitely something that would be difficult to "master". But it really is not too hard at all to get into.. maybe even easier than Joomla (which I have used before in quite a few projects).

Oh and here is that custom module creation tutorial I mentioned, great start: http://drupal.org/node/206753

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
I have created a Drupal module that allows me to use CI in drupal.

The cool thing is that Drupal takes care of access and other stuff. But the bad thing is that I needed to do some changes to CI core to make it work (Had to change some variables to GLOBALS) (And I can not make it work with CI 1.7.x).

I´m not that happy with the solution, but right now I usually make everything in Drupal. I would like to do everything in CI because I like it more. But maybe EE2 is what I need?