Over the years I’ve come across multiple companies or developers who believe in writing their own custom MVC frameworks or CMSs. In my opinion, this is almost always a mistake. Here are three reasons why it’s better to use an existing product.
Less Work (and Therefore Lower Cost)
Why write your own framework or CMS when there are already perfectly good ones out there? The popular ones are tested daily by thousands of users. What could be so wrong with those that you have to build your own from scratch?
Stronger Community
Rails, Symfony, Django, Drupal and WordPress all have many thousands of users. There are certain important benefits to having a large community. There’s more activity on the forums, the documentation is likely to be better, and the product is under stricter scrutiny because it has so many eyeballs on it. If you develop your own internal framework, you might have a community size of 10, maybe even just 1. That makes everything harder.
More Maintainable
If a framework or CMS is popular, more developers are likely to be familiar with it. If no one has heard of your framework or CMS, no one is going to be know how to use it, and it’s going to be more time-consuming and costly to do anything within your project.
There’s rarely a good reason to build a custom framework or CMS. Use a popular one.