What's the deal? Why write your own CMS?

I've set out to build my very own content management system (CMS). "And why am I doing this?" You ask. "That wheel's been reinvented ad nauseum." Well here's my anti-climactic, if not extremely predictable response: I'm just looking for a new challenge. I mean, who doesn't pipe-dream about writing their own game of Chess or Solitaire during their next beach vacation? And who hasn't tried to design their own RSS feed reader over Christmas break? Anyone? Bueller?

Okay, so it's not the most exciting project in the bucket. Sure I have other, more achievable project ideas that I could probably be putting to code; a laundry list of side projects for clients I could be spending a little more time on. Not to mention the actual laundry that has been piling up and that I've been promising my wife I'd wash before it sprouts legs and walks out of our apartment in disgust. My point is...well I've kind of lost the point. Henceforth, my point shall be I want to do it and there's nothing you can do to stop me, so stop complaining and read on.

The inspiration

Back in May I started working on front-end Web development with a largish company in the Knoxville area. On my first day I was tasked with training myself on the company's CMS software of choice: an ASP.NET-based behemoth with a lot of little-use controls and clunky file system design. Sure, it has good documentation, but the modules are fairly non-intuitive. It has a steep learning curve for those not familiar with CMS templating and filesystem, and it forces an incongruous separation of back-end and front-end development. I also have principle issues with using the closed-source ideology of Microsoft-based systems when creating such a globally distributed and innately open-sourced resource as a Web site. I might be a little melodramatic, but there it is. That is what has inspired me to create my own CMS. Well, that and a few other things I won't delve into in this post.

Approaching the giant

Endeavoring to build your own content management system from scratch is all about the process, not the product. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson so eloquently stated, "Program development is a journey, not a destination."...or was that Steve Jobs? Every Web development project I've ever picked up has started out half-baked and ended up only one third finished. This project is really no different and I have roughly the same expectations. I'll put that out there right now, just so we're starting off on the right foot. However, I've never embarked on a project with which I didn't gain exponentially more knowledge.

I've been stewing this idea of a ground-breaking CMS in my head for the past several months. I've only recently decided it would be a brilliant idea to blog about it. Writing brief and interesting prose has never been my strong suit, and I just thought there should be some documentation of that out on the interwebs somewhere, hence this blog is born today. Let's see where it goes.