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I was recently asked something that I myself have been wondering for a while: Does anyone still build intranet-based content management systems (CMS) from scratch? And more importantly, is there any real advantage in doing so?

A little over a decade ago, professional off-the-shelf CMS's and CMS development tools were non-existent. If you wanted a real intranet-based CMS, you had to code it and build it yourself. Looking at the current crop of CMS products and toolkits, I think back to my early years as an intranet developer in the mid-1990's and marvel at what my team and I were able to accomplish with little more than HTML and Perl/CGI.

Back then, Web technologies were in their infancy within our company. There were only a handful of people with any Web design and development knowledge, none of whom were in my team. Despite all this, we managed to build a fully-functional CMS from scratch. We did this not because we wanted to or wanted a challenge, but rather because there were no viable alternatives. We had limited resources and used whatever Web technologies we were able to get our hands on. We learned everything on the fly, and even got a few lumps from trial and error programming. And when we encountered a roadblock that the technology at the time couldn't adequately address, we had to ”MacGyver” a workaround. That's old school CMS development! It was a time when developers had their noses buried in code, and senior management raised their eyebrows in perplexity whenever you said “intranet”.

Now things are completely different. You can buy a professional quality, ready-to-use CMS that requires little to no development beyond installation. Some are simple CMS's; others are full-blown portals that couple CMS features with collaboration and workgroup tools. You still have the option of building a CMS yourself, but development has been greatly eased with content management frameworks such as Joomla!, Plone, and Drupal. These tools give you a stable foundation on which to build upon. You can fine-tune them to meet specific business requirements within your organization and brand your solution to reflect your corporate or system identity.

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