Should you ban CMSs like WordPress as a web developer?

"Developing a site with Wordpress isn't really web development"

You've surely heard this phrase in a discussion between developers, and you may have even thought the same thing yourself. Yet this phrase is completely off the mark and its only consequence is to plant false ideas in the heads of young developers.

Here's why it needs to disappear.

When starting out in development, you want to learn everything, experiment with everything, and do everything yourself, so much so that you quickly forget the developer's primary objective: Solving your clients' problems by implementing technical solutions that match their needs.

And even if, as a junior developer, you'd like to be able to build this showcase site from A to Z for practice. Even if you're ready to give body and soul to develop a back-office and allow your client to modify their site's content independently...

That's not always a good idea.

The "from-scratch" syndrome

Doing everything from A to Z is a great way to learn, but you need to be careful not to fall into the easy path; and by "easy" I don't mean simplicity but rather the tendency to stay within your comfort zone.

Yes, learning a new technology or a new tool is an investment in time but especially in brain power, and it's not uncommon to prefer avoiding this effort by doing everything by hand, with the technologies you already master.

But you shouldn't reinvent the wheel, and even if all existing CMSs have their own flaws, their more or less steep learning curves, I invite you to discover them.

In 2020, about 30% of websites run on Wordpress, so I'd almost be tempted to say:

"Can one be a web developer while ignoring how a third of the world's websites work?"

That would be nitpicking, and at the same time what would we say to a car mechanic who didn't know how a diesel engine works?

This article isn't a plea in favor of Wordpress, but advice drawn from my own experience: don't close yourself off to these tools.

The role of a good developer isn't to know how to code everything in the blink of an eye, but also to be able to find, evaluate, and deploy existing solutions that are comprehensive enough to meet their client's needs.

And even if you dream one day of developing your own CMS, your own e-commerce platform, or whatever else, nothing beats testing existing solutions, having played around with them in order to know their strengths and weaknesses so you can draw inspiration from them.

Before wanting to change the rules of the game, you must first know them.