I think this is the main BIG reason of why developing a CMS from scratch (or third-party solutions), almost every client i have dont use almost any of the features brought by this solutions (Joomla, ZenCart, and so on) its more difficult (and time wasting) for me to manage and customize these “tested hard rock solutions” than to bring up one of my own, and developing it in such a way that i can use it again in some other project (extending it or just making it MORE simple).
greeds!
Just to offer another perspective, I have wasted more time trying to make third-party solutions work for clients than I care to admit. Often, the workflow has nothing to do with how the content editors think of their product, services or content, and the customization required starts to become more of a burden.
But I do believe there are ways of getting around hand-coding forms that just amount to data entry screens for a database. Believe it or not, Codecharge Studio is a fantastic product that allows you to rapidly produce such forms that are especially suitable for CMS. You end up with forms that already have validation, lovely date-pickers and pro-looking designs. Then I use CodeIgniter to write the front-end, of course.
I am doing one such overhaul of a site that was done with Mmabo/Joomla. The client found the provided admin very confusing, she has to weed through a thousand feature she never uses just to enter articles one per month. Now I’ve created an admin that does everything she needed to accomplish with only five admin pages…
Similarly, I recently re-coded a ZenCart site in CI as a custom shopping cart, as the ZenCart templates were becoming burdensome to edit - they take into account dozens of possible conditions and components, when the client only needed a few…
