The plan is to unify all current projects onto one engine and develop new ones.
This requires an engine that can accommodate the variety of projects (billing, information sites, exchanges, etc.) and end users from different countries and languages. We need an engine with multilingual, multidomain, and multilocality capabilities.
While WordPress and Bitrix have been suggested, neither fully meets our requirements as Wordpress is not appropriate for serious projects and Bitrix is expensive and requires additional payment for writing modules. Therefore, we have decided to invest in developing our own engine that has built-in multilingualism and a simple mechanism for adding local text to modules.
The engine must also support deep modularity, deep localization, and an API for interaction between different sites on the same engine. It must also meet modern requirements for minimal hosting load, fast work, security, and SEO.
We are open to using existing open source as a basis but require expert programming skills to competently develop the structure.
We have gone through a particular phase where we have created our engine for our projects. However, it quickly became outdated, and we did not have sufficient time to support and develop it.
This led us to struggle with finding a balance between having a lightweight engine with only the essential functionalities, but not meeting every project's specific requirements.
Finally, we made the distinction between certain types of projects and decided to use ready-made engines such as Bitrix and WordPress for some and develop others from scratch using frameworks.
Custom-built solutions such as websites based on "naked" HTML + CSS or their customized engine have their advantages and disadvantages, which we will explore in more detail. The benefits of creating a website from scratch include excellent adaptation for individual websites with non-standard functionalities, less server load, increased work speed, and high-level protection if the CMS is correctly developed.
but, the drawbacks include the complexity and cost of developing a new CMS, the inability to create new pages or categories quickly, and the need for knowledge of HTML and CSS.
In contrast, ready-made CMSs have several advantages, such as ease of use, simple processes for creating pages, categories, and editing meta-data, built-in visual editors, low server load, easy expansion of functionality with modules, low cost, and timely technical support. However, installing the CMS on web hosting or a server is required, understanding the engine settings is necessary, and some modules that expand functionality may require payment.