Andrew's ramblings

Is Farcry CMS worth considering for your project?

Tags: Coldfusion, Farcry

One of the things that is important to me and most developers that I know, that I value any form of opinion. Is that when you look at evaluating something it has to meet certain criteria. So what am I refering too. As a consultancy company we preach and provide a service that is proven to deliver faster than most conventional practices than developers adopt.

So I hear you asking what has this got to do with FarcryCMS, simply put my time is money in other words what time I spend looking at a solution bites into what the client ends up paying and how quickly they get to see something.

Now we took over the maintenace of a website that is currently using FarcryCMS, the client is not happy with what they have and we have to grin and bear their frustration.

So as I am used to more OO and design paterns, FarcryCMS doesn't use any of these. Farcry has to be a very good feature ridden application, and it can be very easy to use from a users point. But it is the worst product I have ever used from a development point.

However, try getting answers to problems that are in the core of FarcryCMS. And you might see the frustration that one can endure, and the support from the developers is non existant when it is needed the most.

So what is lacking, why do I not like the product. Well it isn't really the product I do not like, it is the attitude behind the scenes that is the issue. Most developers try the documentation, or knowledgebase articles first as to get and answer to a solution or fix a potential problem.

With FarcryCMS that is the problem, the developers have chosen to advance to a new version before fixing the majority of bugs in the application that is currently being used in a production environment nor has any of the documentation got any real content to how to achieve what you are looking at doing.

in fact I got told, update to the beta version it has been fixed there.

And the thing that I discovered very quickly, is that the developers have the attitude that will turn most people away from the product. It is open source software, and we do this because we wont to do it, in other words what this is saying to the developer looking at using FarcryCMS. We don't value your opinion, if you don't like it then don't use it.

To me that is an attitude that one can't ignore, it leaves a bad taste in ones mouth.

So to summarise it up, if you have the time to have a play with a CMS product then look at Farcry it has features that make it a very good product. However, it is let down by the support by its developers they do not care about their product enough to acknowledge that there is a frustration by developers to get quick help, when it is needed.

However if you have a strong budget, then you can pay for support, but my attitude is that if the documentation or knowledgebase can't help, then I would be more than happy to pay for support. But not when the support structure is designed to pray upon them making money from lack of documentation, or the lack of developers providing enough support in the forums.
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