5 Reasons to Build Your Own CMS. NOT!

Things used to be… better?

A little over 20 years ago, I was active as a developer myself. Flash was state of the art, and content management systems (CMS) were just beginning to emerge beyond the Enterprise-Segments. In my student job in Hamburg at Gruner + Jahr, we worked with Interwoven TeamSite – a true monster. But gradually, CMSs also became interesting for smaller agencies and freelancers. TYPO3 existed back then in version 3.x, alongside Mambo (later Joomla), Drupal, and smaller solutions like CMS Made Simple, which were trying to gain a foothold. Usability? Usually a disaster. And so the obvious thought arose: why not develop your own CMS? How hard could it be!?

With this mindset, I was representative of many developers back then – and even today. Some CMS agencies still offer in-house CMS solutions. And indeed, there are reasons to develop your own CMS:

5 Reasons for a Self-Made CMS

1. Full control
2. Minimalism
3. Technological freedom
4. Independence from third parties
5. Learning by doing

At first glance, this sounds convincing. But are these really good reasons?

1. Full control with your own CMS

No foreign code, no plugins that don’t fit – finally everything exactly the way you think is right and logical.

2. Minimalism

Why drag around 100 features when you actually only need three? Less is more.

3. Technological freedom

You can use the technology you know best and are most productive with.

4. Independence from third parties

No license fees, no dependency on external developers or platforms that suddenly change direction or discontinue support.

5. Learning by doing

Anyone who develops their own CMS gains a deep understanding of database structures, permission models, and workflows. You become an expert in your own system and don’t need external documentation – because you built it all yourself. From my perspective, this learning effect is also the only truly valid reason for such a project: you learn an incredible amount.

That’s why we also regularly give our trainees tasks in this area at the start of their training – though exclusively as exercises and never for productive use in client projects. Because in practice, the downsides of a self-built CMS far outweigh the advantages. And that brings us to the list of cons:

5 Solid Reasons Against a Self-Made CMS

1. Security risks
2. Vendor lock-in
3. Missing standards and features
4. Cost trap
5. Lack of future-proofing

1. Security risks

Self-developed CMSs are more vulnerable to security gaps because they do not undergo the extensive testing and security audits that established systems do. Without security teams, bug bounties, or patch days, a CMS can quickly become a gateway for attacks.

2. Vendor lock-in: trapped

What is often presented as full control, freedom, or independence from third parties can quickly flip to the opposite: the developer falls ill, goes on vacation, changes jobs, or simply loses interest? Well, then the project grinds to a halt. This is true even if an entire agency team stands behind the CMS.

3. Missing standards and features

Technological standards, as well as the feature set (multilingual support, media management, role and permission models), are virtually impossible for a lone developer or a small agency to deliver at a professional scale.

4. Cost trap

What initially looks like a lean and cost-effective solution often turns into a never-ending construction site - and in the end, the client pays the bill. On top of that, the provider - whether freelancer or agency - can dictate future costs, since there will hardly be any reliable comparison offers from other agencies.

5. Zero future-proofing

Established CMSs have roadmaps (e.g., the TYPO3 Development Roadmap), a product strategy, as well as a large and committed community or at least a billion-dollar corporation like Oracle, Adobe, or IBM behind them. A self-made CMS lacks all of this, which is why they often disappear just as quickly as they were created.

Conclusion

Even though a self-made CMS may seem tempting from a developer’s perspective, upon closer inspection there is absolutely nothing that truly speaks in its favor. It’s a textbook example of the Not-invented-here syndrome: investing time and energy into something that already exists in mature form on the market makes little sense. For a CMS or digital agency, it is far more worthwhile to rely on established systems such as TYPO3, Drupal, or, in some cases, WordPress – alongside active involvement in the respective community.

For those who need more flexibility, a headless CMS is a much better option than building your own. Beyond that, traditional CMSs can be expanded modularly, and if that still isn’t enough, frameworks like Symfony or Laravel provide a solid foundation for tailored applications and backends – based on proven standards and without vendor lock-in.

Excursus: SIMon

Back in the early 2000s, I actually developed my own CMS – quite modestly named SIMon. It worked without a database, stored content in XML documents, and mainly delivered it for Flash applications. However, processing XML at that time was anything but trivial.

So, while the CMS was used in a few smaller client projects, it was soon replaced. For good reasons. One of them: I quickly lost interest in continuing to develop the thing, because the effort and the benefit simply weren’t in any meaningful proportion. As is so often the case when the Not-invented-here syndrome strikes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.