After suffering through a particular open source platform for over two years, I have a firm foundation in the many pitfalls of open source web development. I’ll refer to said provider as “Droomlapress,” because truthfully, the problems I encountered are common to many open source CMS providers. In full disclosure, I finally saw the light after beginning my job at Sitefinity. Before then, I hadn’t given much thought to other CMS options, only than mine wasn’t doing what it needed to do.
We begin with our heroine mired in Droomlapress, fighting bugs, glitches, a dated theme, and chained to ridged content templates. I had no budget to address any of these issues. Nor could I address the grossly overdue security updates because the original developer had hacked the core. Modules I wanted to install were either out of date or had bugs and were no-longer being maintained by the Droomlapress community. My site was both vulnerable and stuck. Instead of leveraging the web to advance social media, order processing, and customer service, I was stuck in open source prison. Oh yeah, then there’s the cost issue. I laugh when people reference open source as being free. Perhaps it’s free for Droomlapress aficionados and those versed in HTML enough to implement bug fixes, but I am neither. Consequently, my organization was stuck “making due” until the boss would eventually relent and let me hire a developer to implement our changes. However, if he knew they’d blow-past their budgeted hours by 50%, we probably would have “made due” a bit longer.
If only I had known then what I know now: the problem began and ended with my CMS. Had I, I would have pursued another CMS option; one that provided the flexibility we craved, the mobile features we needed, and a user-friendly interface that enabled me to extend at will. Had I done that, we would have SAVED money. With that as background, you can imagine my surprise when I saw Sitefinity. When I saw the demo, I gasped. Seriously, I gasped. A CMS can do THAT?!? It only costs WHAT?!? I spent way more than that on developers to do work that left me wholly unsatisfied. I felt like a total fool. Like the last person on the street to get a smartphone [Wow, it gets internet!]. You get the picture. If only I had used Sitefinity, I could have customized to my heart’s content. I would have had the flexibility I needed to respond to our changing business demands. I would have saved money, time, and aggravation working with external developers. Knowing what I know now, I want to scream from the rooftops, “Don’t suffer in silence! There’s a way out!” It might sound corny, but please take my advice: before you sink any more money into your “free” CMS, I urge you to explore other options. It will save you money in the long run. In fact, an old phrase comes to mind, “penny wise, pound foolish.” Don’t be pound foolish when choosing your CMS.
-Want a way out? Schedule a demo from Sitefinity and see for yourself.
Paulette is a Marketing Writer at Telerik, with over 20 years of Marketing and Marketing Communications experience. A former administrator, content creator, and graphic designer using Droomlapress, Paulette has gladly left those days behind and happily gasps daily using Sitefinity.