The design phase over various CMS’s (or blog engines)

Looking for CMS’s or blogs you tend to select free packages such as Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, Typo, Typo3 or even Wordpress. These tools are good and as a general note one could say: the more flexible solution the better for all. But what do we mean by the word “flexible” and what with the word “all”?

“All” has to do with the developer, the customer and the user. Like a pyramid a user has specific needs, a customer should be able to do a lot of things easily while a developer must be able to determine both of the other groups requirements and even more, such as to modify the look and feel of the result which is in this case a multi-site.

“Flexible” for a user has to do with how he communicates and interacts with a website. I won’t go into details, since this might be the beginning of a very useful, yet irrelevant topic. Flexible for a customer implies an easy way to manage his content, add new,  add or remove whole modules from his website and switch themes among others. Things become more perplexed when it comes to the developer. All of the previously mentioned engines might produce a quite similar appearance but it requires a different amount of time to modify a theme or to provide an interesting user experience each time. Furthermore, a developer often needs to expand a current system by adding core components, to keep it updated, to bridge it with third party modules, to have it accessible etc.

Each approach is strongly attached with a customer’s needs, so there neither a solution that fits all nor a Swiss knife. However I would like to stress an issue which is nonnegotiable when developing a theme (or should I call it template? the terms tend to be identical according to the different packages) for a customer. This is design process or the design cycle. Among the several solutions mentioned above there is one that I didn’t cited on purpose. Expression Engine. EE follows a totally new approach to theme design. Many developers do not care to test a commercial product when there are lots of free. However you should give it a chance.

To put it simple, EE treats a page which is dynamically loaded as a static one. Which means one is totally free to design a whole different layout for it without having in his mind how this page is going to be loaded by the system. This advance which was described here a too simplified way, empowers the designer with a kind of freedom never met in other systems. On the other hand EE requires the learning of its special expressions, which are absolutely necessary in order to run it.

Other systems like Wordpress do provide a similar experience, but not so simply. To start designing in Wordpress a similar way demands a serious amount of time to decompose the way it works. Other packages such as Joomla handle the design process so dazzlingly that after some decent efforts you quit thinking about it.

All in all, we surely desire tools which provide as much design freedom as possible, simply because we already face known confrontations such as browsers’ incompatibilities. Furthermore, when a project runs for a real customer you have to measure the time for money parameter and take certain steps to keep it in control.