Is anyone going to be in the Chicago (Evanston, to be exact) area on May 3 - 5? If so, it would be great to have an opportunity to meet a fellow Geek!

No takers, huh? Well, you missed a great conference! The Big 3 CMS's were all well represented - Drupal, Joomla! and Wordpress - along with some others you'll recognize, or not ;) (Plone, Hippo and ImpressCMS)

Next year DrupalCon will be in Chicago - I know some of you will be going to that, right?

i checked out drupal and dotnetnuke. can't say i am a big fan of CMS's. they're nice and all, but coming from an embedded programming background, i am too much of a control freak.

While some do like the home-rolled web more than an off-the-shelf starting point, I suggest there is some freedom in giving up control of certain aspects of building websites.

What areas are you stringent about controlling?

well...i suppose everything. but to pick one thing, i like to have control over the aesthetics. using the power of CSS to its fullest, along with ASP.NET's master page feature, i like to setup websites to essentially be modular or almost CMS-like, but tailored around how I might make changes in the future. in other words, i kind of know how i might change layout and aesthetics later on, so i setup the website's "framework" around that.

tb

Most content management systems, like Drupal, Joomla! and ImpressCMS separate the content from the layout, allowing you to create whatever look and feel you want. Granted, most people don't go and fully customize a theme/skin/template and most of the sites built on whatever platform tend to look like their siblings.

I don't know much about asp.NET (nothing, actually), but Google is my friend. It looks like a master page is similar to the main template file for a CMS - theme.html in an ImpressCMS theme (my CMS of choice). You have a header area, footer area and the main part of the page, which is normally divided into left column, center column (body) and right column. These can be further broken down and different elements assigned to different areas, based on user and URI. IF you want different zones, you can define as many as you'd like and completely alter the default appearance.

I was a purist at one time, too, building everything from scratch because it gave me a better understanding of the foundation of the web. But, now I liken myself to a writer - I could make paper and ink and bind it into a book, but why should I, when my passion is to put ideas on the page?

i agree on your point of why rewrite the basic info and instead focus on the complex/custom stuff. i suppose i approach all of my software endeavors from the aspect of wanting to understand the underlying framework/mechanism. my theory is that if i don't understand what is behind the scenes, then i really don't know what i am doing or how to write code.

my prime example stems from my days of writing embedded C product code. i didn't truly learn how to write C for a microcontroller until i understood how to write micro code in assembly (machine instruction). only then did i understand how the micro works with memory management and etc.

so, in the same light, even though i have been doing web programming for a while, i still like to understand the underlying structure.

i checked out dnn and drupal, and they have great benefits.

nonetheless and quite frustrating, most of my customers just want a few pretty pictures and "oh, can you make a link on my website?". yeah, frustrating.

Yes, from the outset it makes a lot of sense to 'walk before you run', and clients do need to understand having a website is not the same as having a web strategy for their ministries. Overbuilding a site does the client no good and only frustrates you over the time and energy spent to provide a killer site, only to have it sit dormant.

Even when all they want is some pretty pictures and a few links, I still tend to build on a CMS, if only for ease of maintaining sites for others. Also, when they do grow out of their initial site and want more functionality, it is quite simple to activate the features they now want.

In the end, though - properly selecting the appropriate tool for the job is the key.