How to Bake a Cake with Your CMS

A handy guide to choosing your next content management system

If you’re in charge of your website's next overhaul, you might be debating which content management system (CMS) to use. 

If you’re like me—and always thinking with your stomach—debating which type of cake you should make sounds like a whole lot more fun. 

Am I right? 

Yet determining an ideal CMS is important stuff. Let’s make it, shall we say, appetizing. 

In that spirit, I’ve imagined your CMS doing something it could never do—bake a cake—in order to help you make the best decision for your upcoming site overhaul. 

If you were to bake a cake using your CMS, what would you get? 

Bake a Cake using WordPress

Let’s start with the popular kid. 

If you baked a cake with WordPress, it would require adding a few on-hand ingredients to a pre-made mix...and that's about it.

The result is a plain vanilla cupcake, er…website. Nothing fancy, but technically still cake, right? 

Yeah, a super boring cake. 

Let’s dress it up a little. 

Here’s where WordPress really shines…and stumbles. The sheer number of themes, plugins, add-ons, etc. are mind boggling. Some work brilliantly, some are completely abandoned. Some work well together, others conflict. 

Within a few clicks you can turn your vanilla WordPress site into a fancy-pants drag-and-drop site builder, an e-commerce store, an online magazine, or a host of other things. 

Which is great! I’ve built a lot of WordPress sites and the vast number of options provide such a dizzying array of choices that it's easy to get carried away.

However, just like a cupcake with two layers of frosting, several toppings, and maybe a drizzle of chocolate syrup, adding too many plugins or a wonky theme can result in unappetizing bloat. 

 WordPress: What it's good for …

• Blogs
• Publications 
• Small, no-frills websites

Not ideal for:

• Complex sites
• E-commerce (it works, but isn’t ideal)
• Anything that requires a boatload of plugins to work
• Developers who like simplicity in their code

Bake a Cake using Drupal

Drupal is an open-source CMS that allows you to build a highly customized website and is a real workhorse on the internet.

Bottom line? Drupal is ideal for sites that need to handle a lot. A lot of content, a lot of traffic, a lot of security. 

But with great power comes great complexity, great cost, and … fine, I’ll say it … great responsibility. 

Drupal is nothing short of industrial strength. 

What kind of cake we can bake with this sucker? A freakin’ gingerbread mansion, that’s what.

Drupal: what it’s good for …

• Industrial strength sites—high content, high traffic, high complexity
• Developers who love to tinker
• Some e-commerce use-cases 

Not ideal for:

• Small and simple sites
• Anyone looking for a DIY solution 

Bake a Cake using Squarespace

(Plus others like Wix, Clickfunnels, etc).

First off, these are site builders, not a true CMS. That aside, they’re still popular and gaining momentum simply because these companies have deep ad budgets. 

Oh, and perhaps because they’re easy to use.That could be another reason people like them.

You can get you online in a hurry with very minimal fuss, so I guess that's good, right?

If we used these tools to bake a CMS cake, we…well…we’d probably just grab a hot-and-fresh dozen at Krispy Kreme and forget baking altogether.

Ain’t nobody got time for that. 

DIY site builders: what they’re good for …

• Quickly building sites with minimal fuss and zero tech knowledge
• Building a “good enough” site
• A/B split testing, info product sales, etc (especially Clickfunnels)

Not ideal for:

• Pretty much any other use-case. 

Bake a Cake using Craft CMS

My gut says you’ve probably not heard of Craft or it’s cousin ExpressionEngine. Both of these little gems are capable content management systems that are highly flexible and customizable. 

However, if we baked a cake with Craft, we’d have to start from scratch. No cheating by using a pre-made mix! No templates allowed!

And not just from scratch…but you’re going to have to raise the grain, slash the sugar cane, milk the cow, harvest the cacao, and grow the strawberries. 

THEN you can actually bake the cake. 

But, boy-howdy, with the right chef … er … developer, you’ll get one heck of a cake. 

The beauty of Craft is that it’s so flexible. You can pretty much build the site you need.

The downside? It's not a rapid solution.

In the right hands you’ll get a solid, well-crafted site. 

Lame puns aside...

Craft: What it’s good for …

• Managing loads of complex content 
• Developers and site managers who values flexibility and ease-of-use
• Custom-built sites; anything more complex than a typical boilerplate site
• Custom e-commerce solutions

…what it’s not ideal for

• Git ‘er done sort of websites
• A/B split testing 
• Landing pages

Conclusion

There’s no shame in choosing any CMS over another. Just like there’s no shame in picking up a dozen donuts, constructing a life-sized gingerbread house, or drowning your cupcakes in frosting. 

Just recognize what you’re getting and what it will cost you in the long run. 

Happy baking!

About the author: Andrew Hahn runs circa42.com — a tiny little agency dedicated to building custom sites using, shockingly, Craft. He’s been hacking around in code and design since the early days of the interwebs and has recently taken a solemn oath to never build another WordPress site again. He, his wife, and their six kids live in the Pacific Northwest. Fun fact: He doesn't like cake.