Why We Like Craft CMS
August 23, 2021
A brief, high-level overview of what we like about Craft CMS and why we prefer it over similar PHP content management systems.
For years, the bulk of our work lived in WordPress or Drupal. Both are excellent at what they do, but neither was quite right for the kind of hand-built, high-performance sites we wanted to deliver.
Drupal is spectacular when it comes to managing thousands upon thousands of assets and users. Its permissions are incredibly fine-grained — if we needed to display a subset of tens of thousands of nodes based on a user's location, Drupal would be the tool. But that requirement rarely comes up, and for most sites Drupal is overkill. The learning curve can be rough, and major updates have a habit of breaking things.
WordPress, on the other hand, is truly best-in-class blog software, and there is a very good reason it powers such a large share of the web. The interface is remarkably intuitive, and any competent developer can get a fully featured blog up and running in a matter of hours. The trouble is that WordPress on its own often is not enough — not without a slew of plugins to extend it beyond its core. Those plugins add expense and complexity while, too often, reducing security.
A Better Balance
When we need a PHP content management system, we have primarily moved to Craft CMS. Craft strikes a near-perfect balance: it gives us complete developer control on both the front and back ends while still providing a comprehensive set of tools out of the box.
So What's Different About Craft?
In short, it lets us do everything we want and does not force us to do anything at all. A default installation of Craft ships with no predefined HTML, CSS, JavaScript, fields or content types. That sounds spartan, but it is exactly the point — it is a blank slate that lets developers implement any framework or design without fighting the system's assumptions.
Under the hood, Craft uses the Twig templating engine on top of the Yii PHP framework. Both are solid, mature, secure and well documented. That foundation helps ensure longevity while avoiding technical debt and the breaking changes that come with every major update elsewhere. Where one platform breaks everything with each release and another breaks nothing while quietly piling up legacy code, Craft manages to stay both stable and modern.
The Bottom Line
No single tool is right for every job, and we still reach for other platforms when they fit. But for the bespoke, maintainable, high-performance sites most of our clients need, Craft has become our default — and it is a big part of how we keep our web development both fast and future-proof.