When Written: April 2013
The other evening I was having a conversation with my good friend Steve who works at BT, in our local watering hole and he asked; ‘what do you now define as web development?’ This comment was sparked by the comment that Drupal is now on the PcPro ‘A list’ alongside Dreamweaver as tools for web development.
Now I’m not sure that I would define any CMS as a web development tool, rather I consider it to be a framework which enables web sites to be created. In my book, the development side is the creation of the CMS’s modules, written often in PHP, that webmasters then combine to create the functionality that their web site requires. This means that software like Dreamweaver, Visual Studio, Eclipse and many other similar products, are web development tools. It is very true that whilst the traditional way of building web sites has been replaced for the majority of people by CMS there is still a need for such tools.
I think with CMS that this is more a case of ‘building’ web sites rather that ‘developing’ web sites, perhaps I’m just being pedantic, but the skill set and knowledge to produce a reliable and scalable web site from raw code is a very different one to that of using a CMS to construct a web presence.
It can be sensibly argued that there is little point in coding a web site from scratch when nowadays a few plug in modules in a CMS could achieve most of what you want. Whilst this is certainly true for the majority of sites, the total flexibility offered by programming a web site from scratch still has its place and debugging your own code is a heck of a lot easier than trying to find why a group of CMS modules written by different people are not behaving in the way that you would like them to!
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton