Should I use a content management system?

Question

This question has been bugging me for almost a week now. I've gone ahead and started using Composite C1(since I already had some MVC3 code). I'll outline my high-level requirements:

• User Profiles (Log in/ Log out/ Activity history/ gamification etc.)
• Profile pages for Tools (Need this for storing help documents, training videos, comments for various softwares)
• Forums (I need to analyze threads and perform sentiment analysis so i need the data with me and not hosted on a third party like nabble)
• Classifieds with intuitive matchmaking for task seekers and providers (based on certain rules)

Since I'm new to using a CMS I'm not sure if I would actually end up using anything off the shelf. Looks to me like I'll have to build a custom component for every feature so I'm thinking is it better to just go ahead and code this myself (ASP.Net MVC3 application).

Will i save considerable time and effort (assuming a decent learning curve for Composite as well) if I go with C1 compared to coding this myself?

Answer 1

no doubt, you will still code for those things you want done, but, the advantage of having a CMS is that it will be easier to manage. Remember it's a management tool. It will give you a UI where you can upload the pages ,and where exactly in a particular page (middle , bottom etc) plus more. One CMS I've used is dotnetnuke . You can check it here. http://www.dotnetnuke.com/ -->(it will give you templates like of that in the site plus more. You can even make one yourself)