Hi. I am IT Engineering undergraduate student and i am about to start building my bachelor thesis which is to build a CMS/platform for a service in my university. It will be in production, and they already provided me a space on their servers to start prototyping.
Now, about Meteor, i have already created 2 medium/big projects, and some side smaller projects with it. My stack is React/Redux/Meteor/MongoDB and i love to build anything from zero.
Now my issue is that it will be academic project which staff and students will use daily, i am the only developer and there will not be anyone to maintain it after me. So my point is that i really dont want to have an commitment on it, i dont want after 1-5 years to call me and tell me there is a problem to fix it and have it on my back.
I can always go for already CMS like drupal, wordpress etc, create a custom template, create some custom plugins if needed. Or go with my stack (Meteor).
I need some help/advice on what problems can popup in long term, what solutions do i have and which way to choose.
One of the benefits of Meteor is that you only need a Meteor developer to work/maintain on the project after its completion.
In contrast, when it comes to rolling your own stack, a developer would need to be familiar with all of the technologies you chose, how they’re integrated, how you build it, deploy it, etc.
I think unless you are building something crazy, Meteor gets the job well done and offers a lot of benefits over rolling your own stack.
Sorry maybe i wasnt clear enough. My topic is about choosing between Meteor or popular CMS or any other suggestion, trying to minify (to zero if possible) future maintenance and commitment.
If that’s the case and the app will continue to be used for a while after you’ve created it (and you won’t be maintaining it), then don’t build a custom CMS. I know it sucks but you’re going to have to turn off the developer part of your brain that’s screaming “hey, we can build an awesome custom CMS with Meteor!”. Seriously - leverage a popular off the shelf CMS that’s easy to use and widely supported, like Wordpress. Install it, add a modern theme, tweak it a bit, leverage off the shelf 3rd party plugins, develop a few custom ones if you have to, then ramp the users of the system up on how to use it, and assign a few admins. If anyone calls you up for help later on down the road, it will be WAY easier (and cheaper) to point them towards one of the many million Wordpress dev shops out there (and that’s just in Bangalore …).
This is what i am thinking. But the developer part of my brain is always screaming, and not because it will be just awesome but because its more easy and joyful for me to code what functionality, ui, anything i am thinking, than search for plugins, test them if that work how i want them, go back to php and mysql…
In the end Meteor app is just javascript, right? But if it works now it will work as it is after 3-5 years?
I can prototype/test it with wordpress but somehow even from now, something says me you ll struggle more than build it by yourself
Some challenges that will be there are, filesystem for sure, and wysiwyg editor (draftjs), there will be 4-5 user roles ( which they will can edit specific content ), deploying and set up the server
Haha - I know. I didn’t say I actually follow my advice … a client of mine recently got in touch saying they needed a super quick easy to maintain static site up ASAP. Of course throwing up a Wordpress install with an off the shelf theme, or better yet using squarespace, made complete sense. So obviously I instead built a super simple fully custom meteor + react + redis + dropbox CMS …
Don’t worry about being contacted. You are doing it for free, nobody sane truly expects for something to be maintained for free as well. Do it as you please and open source it.
If it ever needs any maintenance after, the uni will probably find other students to contribute, and if they really need you, ask for a fee; you will hold no obligations towards them.
Since it’s your bachelor thesis, it’s more important that you have what to write about and your professors to see you are being able to build software from the ground up. Using an already made CMS is a bit of a downer from this point of view.
