Looking for freelancers to develop CMS

Hi Derrick,

First of all, this forum is not the correct place for this sort of topic. These forums are for learning. I would reconsider posting a job here as most of the forum members are beginner/intermediate level users. I believe you're looking for this https://teamtreehouse.com/jobs.

Secondly, I would strongly, strongly urge you to reconsider building your own CMS. All the functionality you just specified are already covered with WooCommerce or plugins for it. When you build your own CMS you're opening the door to all sorts of things, most importantly, bugs and security. Wordpress has been around forever and has arguably one of the largest communities of a CMS supporting it. WooCommerce also has a massive community behind. These communities provide progression with the software... meaning you will always have updates, security patches, features etc. You lose all that with your own CMS... which makes it A. more dangerous and B. more expensive. If WooCommerce and Wordpress are missing a feature you really want, then maybe build a plugin yourself to fill that need?

I'm not certain your motives, but if they are what you stated above the solution you have in place should be sufficient?

:) It makes logical sense right? But the reality is, there are bugs in all software. Why else does Microsoft and Apple consistently have updates? There is no such thing as the perfect software.

I speak from experience Derrick. My company has built our own CMS, it has cost us > $200,000 and we still have to pay $75 /hr 40hrs a week for developers to enhance/maintain it. Are you sure you want that cost?

That, my friend, sounds like an awesome idea and a graceful solution!

There are a lot of CMSs out there. I would document what your needs are and look for systems that either fit those needs or how difficult it would be to extend the CMS to achieve your goal.

Some quick things I look at when deciding a CMS is the age of the system, the amount of development (ie are there people constantly working on it) and the community behind it.

We looked at a few options and the owner hired a consultant whom decided to build to build our own. We went with their recommendation and after about 6 months of pure frustration and expenses we ended up firing the consultant. Since then we have had to maintain and extend the system since it was already in production.

In retrospect we should have used an off the shelf solution and extended it instead.

I guess I've already been down this path before and I'm purely trying to advise from experience. Ultimately it is your choice Derrick, I just wanted to try and help because I've been there and done that.

I would gladly help in the process if you need it. Feel free to email me nfuller52@gmail.com

Yes and no. Correct, our owner didn't (and still doesn't) know anything. So he was sold pretty easily. But the consultant actually was legitimate and I still have a great deal of respect for her. She had come from a company that had rebuilt AAA's software infrastructure which saw over a 200% ROI in the first year and after 3 years was in the 2,000% range... or something ridiculous like that. We checked references, did the entire song and dance... Unfortunately sometimes people just go with what they know instead of what was right. In this case, she had us build our own CMS and grossly underestimated the project in just about every way possible, time, money, resources etc. We should have found existing CMSs and extended them. And now 3 years late I have this beast of burden which is so engrained into our business we cannot do with out it.