Expert advice on CMS

The gaming industry is experiencing a fundamental change driven by the convergence of the various player interaction channels, and the increasing diversity of the available gaming content and gameplay models. For those organisations that focus on the value of offering to their players the optimal user experience, the design of the gaming portal across the desktop, the tablet and the mobile devices becomes of primary importance. The gaming portal becomes the focal point where content is formed, distributed, optimised and consumed, and therefore the relative content management system (CMS) becomes a key ingredient of operational success.
  Selecting the optimal CMS framework needs to balance a number of factors, that relate to flexibility in incorporating gaming requirements and functional capabilities, ensuring ease of use, structuring in a modular architecture that provides for expandability and maintainability, and time-to-market among others. Utilising a pre-built, off-theshelf, content management system (CMS) versus building your own is a never-ending debate in gaming portal development circles. It seems that most people are fearlessly defending of one or the other in a manner resembling the programming language wars.
  Nevertheless, choosing a CMS is an important decision for any portal as the maintenance and update of the many different sections that modern gaming portals have requires a system that makes such a task quick, efficient and user-friendly.

The term 'content management system' sounds like a single-purpose tool purely for managing content. In a very broad sense that is what a CMS does, but the definition of content in the gaming portal case covers much more than meets the eye.
  Here, the CMS requirements need to satisfy gaming-specific content and features. Namely, game clients but also features surrounding the game to form the 'game ecosphere'. Therefore the CMS can be considered as a bundled or standalone application that allows publishing, storing and deploying gaming content on the portal web pages. A gaming portal CMS should provide the right tools to adapt the content based on a user’s profile or past behaviour within the portal. Furthermore, with the ever-increasing usage of mobile devices, it should be able to provide the right technology to adapt both content and functionality to different screen sizes and offer the user with the best experience according to the portal accessing channel.
  In this broader sense, it should also allow the creation of documents from different gaming component parts originating from different vendors. It might enable operators to assemble individual components into a document structure in such a way that these components can be re-used within other document or even across multiple documents.

What some would consider the most compelling argument for the use of a CMS is that many of them are open source and therefore free. However, anyone that says open source is free is wrong. It is not free, but it most definitely will be cheaper. So if CMS do all of these things, and several of them are free, why don't all gaming portals use them? You may wonder. Let’s try to provide some answers to that question by enumerating the most important advantages of using a pre-built CMS.
  Ideally, once a pre-built CMS is set up, someone with little or no technical skill can perform updating of content. Therefore, a simple gaming portal can be set up in relatively little time. Much free support is available via online forums, as well as add-ons to expand functionality. In addition, readymade graphics templates are available for purchase or free download for many pre-built CMS (provided that you are not looking for something exotic).
  A mature pre-built CMS has undergone years of testing and development by teams of developers, and therefore has relatively few undocumented bugs. In addition in-house personnel with previous experience in the chosen CMS can be employed immediately.
  Unfortunately we are not living in an ideal world, and therefore we should also consider that the set-up of a pre-built CMS can be difficult for someone without experience of the specific platform. Additionally, proper documentation for the underlined mechanisms is inadequate. So prepare to have some interesting surprises along the way.
  A pre-built CMS has a great deal of overhead code for the purpose of creating and operating the system framework and module system. All this overhead code can cause it to run relatively slowly and consume a lot of server resources.
  The functionality of the portal is limited to that available in the premade modules. Pre-built CMS usually have a module to which some custom functionality can be added, but there are limits to what can be done. At some stage, customisation might not necessarily be that easy. Modifications that don't fit into the framework and the provided module system will probably be very difficult, even for an experienced programmer.
  Another interesting fact is that prebuilt CMS are slow to respond to changes in technology, and new versions can be infrequent. In addition, back compatibility is usually a serious obstacle to new technology absorption. Installation of updates to, or new versions of, a pre-built CMS may require major changes to the existing installation, or in some case a complete reinstallation.
  On the other hand, let’s quickly look at some of the key advantages of a custom-made CMS solution. In this case, a gaming portal can be created with only as much code as it needs for the functionality you want. You can add any kind of functionality to your portal, not being limited to just that which is available in readymade CMS modules.
  Well-documented (and well-programmed) custom code can be much simpler and easier to modify than pre-built CMS code, particularly for the programmers who wrote it. The resulting custom code will run faster because it doesn't have all the overhead code.
  Custom CMS can be updated to respond to changes in technology at any time (after all, it's your system). You own the code (although you may not necessarily own every single piece of it).
  But again, there are some disadvantages too. Custom CMS coding can be expensive and usually requires a long time to build. In addition, it is more likely to have bugs and needs frequent testing. Newly hired programmers will not have had any previous experience with your code and it will probably take them a while to become familiar with it.
  Custom code that has been worked on by different programmers over a period of time can develop inconsistencies and documentation problems, and therefore becomes harder to modify and maintain.
  Migrating custom code to a different server might be more difficult because it lacks scripts that automatically create the databases and perform the set-up, such as those boasted by a pre-built CMS.

So now that you know some of the advantages and disadvantages of each, you should be better prepared to make this decision. You need to decide whether or not you need the functionality that a pre-built CMS offers. If you need the functionality of the modules available with a pre-built CMS, then installing it and adding this functionality would probably be far easier than adding similar functionality to a custom-coded solution. If you do not need this or if you require custom functionality that is difficult to add to a prebuilt solution you may rule out using one. Do you need maximum flexibility in being able to modify the layout and appearance of the pages of your portal? If so, this would also rule out using a pre-built CMS. Do you need cuttingedge technology? Then this might be difficult to achieve using a pre-built CMS.
  How quickly you need your gaming portal is another question that needs a proper answer. If you're in a hurry to put your portal up, then a pre-built CMS is usually far faster to install than a custom portal is to program. And finally: cost. If cost is an issue then installing a open-source pre-built CMS will be far cheaper than custom code, even if you pay someone else to customise it for you.
  Being a coder who does use pre-built systems, but also likes to build custom systems, I think the solution chosen does come down to the exact business requirements. Both custom and pre-built CMS offer similar programmatic benefits with no real limitations, so for most businesses, budget seems to be one of the key factors in deciding between the two. Using a pre-built system may well be quick and easy, but when you need to build something unique it can very quickly become a time-consuming mission to customise it. Whereas if you build a custom solution from scratch, you can build it the right way for the client and the end solution will be leaner, sleeker, faster and easier to use. After all, you need to decide what you would like to offer to your customers; your IT expertise in customising a pre-built solution to fit to a given project or your vision in gaming portal technology.

Chris Chrisostomidis started his career on CAD systems and soon he was experimenting porting these to the web. In the early 2000s he started designing large-scale web-based information management systems. In mid 2009 he moved into the gaming industry. He holds a PhD degree in CAD systems and has won various innovation awards