Brainnovate

I heart PHP.

Hear what Feldman has to say about Rails - (probably not true, but funny still):

http://www.seesmic.com/video/EKID7pIhzp

I agree that you can’t rely on pre-packaged CMS’s for something that is really different. Of course, that should be obvious to anyone serious about making a difference on the web. If you’re building a web application with a special purpose, you should define your objectives and build from the ground up to fulfill them.

As you mention, using a framework is a great way to get off to a good start while still fine tuning the system to your needs. I’m partial to the Zend Framework, myself, but I know a lot of people who swear by Rails.

Why not combine the two ideas? In other words, have a rails-like framework AND out of the box functionality so that everytime you want a blog, or multi-language support, or OpenID, or an ecommerce engine, you have something to work from?

That’s what the open source community around SilverStripe is doing…

… see the videos at http://www.silverstripe.com/overview/

Rails is a framework written in an ugly language. Python, also ugly. Facebook and myspace are CMS. they aren’t prepackaged out of the box CMS but I’ll bet you (a lot) they stole feature sets from some of the major projects you’re ripping on. Building off of what other people have already done is the best way to speed up development and innovation. Every site is going to need user management, page / content management so why not leverage what’s been done and build innovation on top of ‘everyone has that’ features? I think people rooted in packaged CMS development will continue to develop within that box / framework so i’ll agree those deep within a project or community will continue to refine but not really innovate their own projects. It’s those on the fringes that will push the envelope and innovate so I’d be more for including those on the edges of discussions in the core development of projects to get more innovation. The genericization of CMS projects and attempting to standardize what everyone does also forces things not to be innovative. Drupal was innovative on it’s own at one time now that everyone uses it (or wordpress or joomla or ______) they no longer are “innovative”.

Your blog is about Innovation, yet it seems like you have a very limited definition of what innovation should be.

First of all, you know nothing about Drupal, so you’re in no position to judge it. And also, Drupal is not at all like Wordpress, it can do a lot of other things beside just a stupid blog platform.

Secondly, you can still create innovation by using existing tools, instead of having to do it from scratch. To developers, Drupal and Joomla are also frameworks, and using them help us avoid a lot of “reinventing the wheel” problems. And by saying Drupal is a framework, I mean it is by no means less powerful and creative than Rails and Django (which are also frameworks, right?).

If you want to create a web apps, like Google Map, of course Drupal (or any other CMS) is not the right choice. But when it comes to managing contents, Rails, Django, Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress or whatever have the same powers and possibilities for developers to harvest.

to btopro: “Drupal was innovative on it’s own at one time now that everyone uses it (or wordpress or joomla or ______) they no longer are “innovative”.”

Your comment shows how ignorant you are. Innovation is not measured by how many people are using it. As long people continue to contribute to the its development, it can still be considered innovative and useful.

Standardization to some extent is a facilitator of creativity, because it prevents “reinventing the wheel”. If you like to make a renovative innovation by yourself, just go create a web page using assembly and you’ll become god.

Oh, and another important point I’d like to make:

Do not blame the tools for the lack of creativity and innovation, blame its users.

So your argument is, that if Wordpress and Drupal weren’t invented already one should invent them and because they already exist they are bad for innovation? I’d say you’re right.

it’s always good to know what your write about. you said by yourself that you never tried drupal. so how can you judge? i have to say that opposite is the case from what you wrote. drupal is the key to many very innovative website that have never been created like this before.
of course when you plan a website you will check what cms or framework or language can do what you need. thats a normal process.
sorry, your article is useless and wrong.

Innovation is about combining tools in new and creative ways. Ultimately, we’re re-using ones and zeros here!

It’s also about leverage. For example a blog writer, like yourself, seeks to be innovative (or brainnovative) with ideas and opinion - if wordpress (or whatever) helps you do this, then wordpress is good for innovation.

I get your basic premise, but in my experience, innovation comes from unexpected places and to say something as general as “CMS’s are bad for innovation” or ” great new (rarely or never before seen) idea is unlikely if you are working within the constraints of a CMS, without doing some significant programming on top of it” is somewhat silly. Whose to say how innovation will manifest itself? Innovations themselves are somewhat unlikely. And, innovation can span many different areas of expertise, not just software development. Whose to say that a new style of photo-journalism couldn’t be developed on one of these platforms?

It’s easy to blind ourselves with our own assumptions and miss the possibilities for innovation that are right in front of us.

Scott, I might have been able to buy your premise in a really narrow sense of “innovation”… if you’d posted this a few years ago, about different pieces of software. But I get the impression you’re thinking about CMSes in ways that don’t really match the current reality.

One of the really interesting things about Drupal, WordPress and similar platforms is that they go well beyond what we usually think of as content-management or blogging with a rich, well-documented capacity for extensibility. So there’s a firestorm of innovation going on in the creation of new modules and plugins, as developers push back the limits of those platforms and build entirely new web applications. One example: the Managing News collaborative new aggregation platform created by Development Seed from Drupal.

Then there’s the ongoing innovation that drives the development of the core features of each platform. Working out how to optimize database queries and tighten up workflow may not be the kind of revolution you’re looking for… but that less sexy, more incremental innovation is no less necessary to technological and social progress.

I know there’s a kind of macho, “it-doesn’t-count-unless-you-built-it-yourself” view of web development out there, but it’s becoming increasingly irrelevant. As others have pointed out, a platform like Plone or Drupal can free a developer from having to reinvent the wheel - especially for rapid prototyping and proof-of-concept projects. Sure, they might eventually migrate to custom-built software… but in the meantime, we’ve saved ourselves months and months of development time while we focus on innovation at the human interface and collaboration level.

Ultimately, in a world of rich APIs and open-source software, it gets less and less useful to try to shoehorn technology into the same old categories. It’s an exciting time.

[...] Why Wordpress, Drupal, and other CMS’s are bad for Innovation (tags: innovation web2.0 blog software CMS wordpress drupal) [...]

Rob’s point of view is spot on.

My friend Jeremy over at QuitYourDayJob lost two weeks of his life trying to teach it to sit, stay, and fetch. Now it works great.

So why do you complain? If it took him only two weeks (which I actually doubt) this is a great result. Do you think he’d been faster if he had used any framework you mention?

One of the unfortunate things about this note, though perhaps understandable from an author who openly doesn’t know about the subject, is that Drupal is a framework. It’s also a CMS but the idea that people who are seriously aiming to do large innovative projects aren’t using the Drupal framework is quite laughable given the number of large innovative sites deployed using this framework.

[...] at Brainnovate, Scott Miller writes that a CMS is bad for innovation. Now his opinion is clearly biased and [...]

[...] at Brainnovate, Scott Miller writes that a CMS is bad for innovation. Now his opinion is clearly biased and [...]

Well it seems that many people have already debunked your post, but I would just like to join the crowd. Look at the sheer number of innovative Wordpress plugins. A lot of the trends being set are a gradual collection of plugins and addons to open source projects, which are sometimes even combined into the project itself. I can’t believe how far off the mark you are about innovation.

I recently started a project of my own from scratch and wrote a whole lot of code for a login system. This was for my own benefit, but when I have deadlines to meet I don’t have time to reinvent the wheel. I would rather grab the wheel and add my innovations on top of it. I think the opensource community is leading the way in innovation.

WordPress really is an awesome CMS for the simple stuff, as you say. If you need to create a brochure site or blog site, it’s terrific and all the free plugins out there allow you to do so much cool stuff.

From my (somewhat limited) experience with Drupal though, it seems like you can do all kinds of web applications with it. And you can do a lot of innovative stuff with it since it is built to allow developers to create modules that plug into what’s already there.

Why reinvent the wheel?

Very interesting post though. You make some good points. I have seen examples of people building some innovative new site, very quickly, with Ruby on Rails.

From my experience:

1. CMS’s enable innovation because they have already taken care of the boring stuff. 95% of websites do the same thing, your innovative piece is just the last 5%. Why waste time at user management, theme systems, caching, database input cleansing, etc? After learning Drupal and developing websites with Drupal, I just can’t believe anyone would want to build a site from scratch.

2. Drupal really can function as a framework as well as a CMS. Check out what Adobe has done with its community site for Flex http://flex.org/showcase/

Thank you for this article. I will let others know about this site so then can learn as well

Brilliant!