In the past I’ve usually taken projects and sat down with the MD to spec them up and finally sat down to write the code. This was the approach for pretty much every website or program I’ve done (including the software this blog used to be run on) as it gives us much greater control over the visual characteristics and the features of the stuff we produce. Another reason is that some of the sites we’ve done have been suites of sites, such as Find Locally which just aren’t compatible with existing bits of software and need to be custom from stage 1.

Recently though, we’ve been working on projects that lend themselves quite well to being run on open source solutions. I therefore decided to give it a go and set up one of our retail sites, Erogenicity, to run off OScommerce and then see how difficult it would be to modify it to our unique requirements. As it turned out, it was a lot easier than I thought it would be so I decided to take the plunge and reduce maintenance time on some of our existing projects (such as running all our blogs on Wordpress), as well as reducing development time on new stuff.

So far there haven’t been any problems so from now on I’ll be checking for any open source solutions I can utilise before sitting down to weeks of coding. I’ll also be looking for any missing features so I could possibly write an extension/contribution and give something back to the community!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 11:59 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.