Propaganda Party: The Pop Stalin Design Manifesto

Yes, I’m obviously infatuated with Wordpress right now. What can I say I’m definitely smitten. Anyway, there’s an interesting discussion that took place last month over at ZDNet entitled “WordPress vs. an army of clunky content management systems.” Basically the author ponders why so many companies roll out custom CMS software when Wordpress and other open source options are available and, in my and the author’s opinion, probably better written than in-house CMS’s.

At ZDNet we use WordPress for blogs, but in previous positions I’ve almost always had some custom built creation that usually stinks. Sure, these CMS systems may have started out as standard, but sooner or later they turn into this Frankenstein creation. And lookout below if the guy that cooked up the code ever leaves. If there’s an open source option that has rich features why would you spend time building the same thing?

Of course I have an opinion on why so many in-house developers are against using open source software. I think part of the reason is that the developers may not be too familiar with PHP. Most of these folks are Microsoft certified so most of the stuff is going to be written in ASP… to date you don’t see a lot of open source ASP software out there on the net. I actually had one Microsoft certified developer tell me PHP would be dead within a year—that was 2-3 years ago now and he was fired before the year was up anyway.

I think it also comes from a fear of losing one’s worth in the marketplace. If a company has all these highly-paid Microsoft certified developers on staff and suddenly you bring in open source, why do you need them? I think open source software is a perfect compliment for small to medium sized businesses and particularly non-profits. Instead of spending large chunks of money for people to reinvent the wheel, they could go with available solutions that wouldn’t cost them a dime.

But of course, not everyone is web or business savvy and may not know there are options available to them in the first place. Which is why as web designer’s we must go forth and plant the open source seed. Now I’m sounding like Johnny ‘Web Designer’ Appleseed.