I’ve come into contact with a lot of different content management systems over the years, from the off-the-shelf to the handmade by pixies varieties. Apart from the almost universal truth that everyone hates their content management system, I’ve found them all to be remarkably different. From the basic to the complex to the complex-but-should-have-been-basic they’re all out there and most of them are dangerous.

Whilst working in a design agency seven or eight years ago where I was building mainly ASP/VBScript projects, we were approached by a client to perform a redesign of their existing site. The site had originally been built by one of the very large design agencies who, as was quite common at the time, had offices all over the world. Part of the redesign necessitated some changes to their custom-built ASP content management system, so we set about requesting the source code from the original design agency.

Whilst our client was based at an office in London, their headquarters were in Norway, and it was the Norwegian division that had originally commissioned the site, which itself was all in English. (With me so far? Good.)

When I got hold of the source code, I was horrified. By that point I had been coding for few years, but on the whole wasn’t massively experienced in developing complex applications. With hindsight, I expect what I was looking at was an attempt to implement an architectural pattern like MVC or similar, but what I was faced with was an absolute rats nest of code. I say an attempt to implement because if you’ve ever worked with ASP and VBScript you’ll be familiar with its lack of basic features such as dynamic includes, optional function parameters and hash tables that make building a well structured application something of a challenge.

As an aside – because I still find this amusing to this day – ASP processed file includes before interpreting any of the script. On a first pass, ASP would recursively process any includes in the script, grabbing their contents and squirting it into the parse structure at the desired point. The entire thing would then be fully parsed and finally the VBScript interpreted. This meant that not only could you not decide in your script whether or not to include a file, but that those file names had to be static. There was no way to dynamically construct the file path based on runtime input. It was a joke, but like the worst joke you’ve ever heard, told by someone with the comic timing of a tax accountant. But I digress.

So there was I with my rats nest of ASP in something of an attempt at some architectural pattern or other, trying to figure out how best to make the changes I needed to make in order to have the CMS work with the new site design. Whilst not a massively pleasant job, that sort of task is usually reasonably bearable provided that the variables and functions are logically named and that the code is well commented.

Well, I could see that the code was heavily commented, but whether any of it was logical I couldn’t possibly tell you because every comment, variable and function name was in Norwegian.

That was my nightmare with a content management system. What’s been yours?