Customizing wordpress for building a CMS

Question

I am working on building a CMS where the user will get a control of all the components he wants to use,without using any templates.He will have a dashboard and a control panel which will include the components like menus,galleries,text boxes etc.He will have a easy to use drag and drop UI to work on his website.
Now I am researching on using either a framework like Cake/Zend or customizing wordpress to achive the goal.
I would like the experts to guide which would be more feasible? Is customizing wordpress,which is theme based a easy way(By easy I mean achievable in a decent period of time) or building it from scratch using a framework?
If I think about wordpress it uses structured templates which allows us to change the themes easily.Now I would like to by pass this and allow user to just use a drag and drop approach to build a website.The themes wont come into picture in our scenario,so can I eliminate them?.
But I am not sure if wordpress allows this as its entirely based on structured themes/templates.
(The idea is very raw and spare me if it sounds odd.work is in progress for it)

Answer 1

Have you considered using Joomla? Probably a better option than Wordpress.

http://www.joomla.org/

Honestly though, I think your idea is a little flawed. You want to build an easy to use CMS that users can drag and drop components onto a page to make their website, yes? But nobody is going to want to build an unthemed, unstyled website. So now you are back to the idea of templates/themes.

Otherwise, you are asking the user to be a designer as well, and they would style their site. But unless I'm missing something, the whole point is that they can do it without prior knowledge of web dev (otherwise, why would they use your CMS if they already know how to design a website?).

Even if you do have them designing the theme for the site via an easy to use UI (colour-pickers, etc.), I guarantee if you built up a following for your CMS everyone would want theme support because when there are others who have created nice looking themes, why should they not be allowed to share them? Some people cannot design, and would prefer to use a nice one they found from someone else. There is a reason Wordpress has a hugely popular templating community, and it's one of the main reasons your average non-developer likes making their websites with them.

If you are really talking about having zero templating support, then I assume all your components are skinned to some sort of default that your CMS provides. People would be complaining in no time about not being able to change the look of their site.

Anyway, back to the question about where to start building your CMS, you could try building a CMS for CakePHP. I believe it has been attempted before, but there isn't a good or finished one that I know of. There is probably a reason for that.

I think you would be trying to reinvent the wheel somewhat, and I doubt your CMS would even come close to Joomla or even Wordpress because they have been developed for so long, and have contributions from so many people all over the world, as well as communities of millions.

Developing a CMS from scratch is a monumental task, and there are probably thousands of things you haven't properly thought about in terms of making a product that is easily accessible and user-friendly for anyone. There are so many huge issues like cross-platform, security, rich features, high customisability, etc. Not to mention the things you are asking to bypass, such as templating (I don't know if that includes developing components/modules).

All things considered, I think you would be better off taking Joomla and trying to develop a drag and drop editor or something. It would be slightly easier in Wordpress though, I think, as it's a simpler system.

Good luck.

Answer 2

Having built tons of WordPress sites and several fully customized Content Management Systems from the ground up, I can say that we always tend to underestimate the time it takes to build your own CMS.

It is very intense, especially if you are serious about security, cross-browser compatibility, and user experience.

That being said, WordPress is great, but if you're going to seriously alter the purpose for which it exists, which it sounds like you are, building management modules completely outside of WordPress, then I'm not sure how WP would actually help.

Although more detail on what you're trying to accomplish would be nice, I would personally recommend ExpressionEngine. It's not free, and there's a reason for that. It's slick and powerful, and it sounds much more in line with what you're trying to do than WordPress.