Being a wiz is great for the provider that creates the website, but let’s not lose sight of who actually uses it in the end. Unless you provide maintenance services on behalf of your clients, chances are, the client is the one who will be using the CMS on a daily basis to make changes themselves. We all know that CMS's have lots of bells and whistles for developers, but is it appropriate for the person who doesn’t know about HTML, CSS, PHP, etc? At the end of the day, they are the ones who need to be comfortable with using it--otherwise it never gets used and defeats its own purpose. At OcularCMS^®, we feel that having a platform that is simple, visual, and hides all the technical stuff by default is probably a much better solution. If you don’t believe us, ask your clients to demo OcularCMS^® and ask them if they find it easier than their current CMS.

Having access to backend code is potentially disastrous. Many CMS's allow anyone (including clients) to access critical components that can easily “break” the site. This can happen due to actions that are either intentional or accidental. In either case, one wrong move can bring the entire site down. And if they don’t have a person to turn to, they feel helpless and frustrated.

Plugins can be created by anyone that knows just enough about PHP to be able to make something work. Sometimes the developers are inexperienced (not you, of course!). For those with malicious intentions, this is obviously very dangerous. But even if there are no ill intentions, there are still risks due to lack of experience, poor or non-existent security measures, and inefficient code. And then if/when a vulnerability is discovered and exploited, it’s up to the developer to create a patch for it (which makes little sense because if they lacked experience to make it properly from the start, how can you trust them to fix it?). And then that patch needs to make its way down to every website that uses their plugin. When downloading an open-source CMS and installing on a self-hosted account, the platform needs to be maintained on an ongoing basis to ensure that everything is kept up-to-date and patched. Even automatic updates can need manual intervention now and then. And this means that someone needs to be in charge of all this. The model of most designers is to create sites without ongoing support after the project is completed, potentially leading to vulnerabilities as soon as “the car drives off the lot”.

Installing and configuring a CMS and it’s various plugins is time-consuming and requires technological knowledge to accomplish. OcularCMS^® requires zero server configuration or installation and replaces plugins with built-in features that accommodate the needs of most websites. If there are ever any features that are lacking, usually third-party widgets can address the need. Plus, anyone can make a request at any time to add a new feature to OcularCMS^®.