Ever since I debuted my Content Management System a few weeks ago, I've gotten much positive feedback and some questions. Most of the feedback came from web designers who loved the idea of custom-built solutions and wanted to know more on how they could build their own CMS, or just be able to more effectively modify existing solutions to meet their clients' needs.

This is the start of a series where I'm going to dive into the "need to know this" ideas of PHP that I mainly use in much of my code work. As this series progresses, you'll learn how to pull and display data from a database, add new data in, edit it, and delete it when you want. I'm sure proficient PHP coders won't be interested in this series, but this is ideal if you're just diving in and want results faster.

With the myriad of choices for a content management system (CMS) out there, it would seem silly that I would just go out and build my own. I mean, we have Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, NUKE...why would I go and build my own?

I have a variety of valid reasons that I will share with you today, as well as give you some insight if you ever want to try this on your own. If you want to pass on all this and just see the demo, click here.

It started with a tweet from a designer who showed his disdain for the new generation of web designers who can't even write any HTML code. His tweet grew into an explosion of replies, retweets, blogs, comments, and debate on this subject. Both sides chimed in speaking of how he's right and others on how he's wrong.

I myself subscribe to his beliefs. I can't imagine doing web design without the knowledge that I've amassed in coding and just simply "how things work". I've borne witness to many incidents where a lack of knowledge in code on the part of a designer has ended up making a project into a large mess.

I must admit I was surprised. I engaged in my usual wake-up regime of reading the news and Facebook when I came across an article posted on wpcentral.com and USA Today. It spoke of a study that showed that while millions of people own smartphones, most barely use more than five apps on a regular basis

The central thought journalists were trying to make is for the millions of apps floating around the various stores, most users really didn't seem to care. Outside of news, weather, email, and some social network apps, most apps simply are barely used or never used; and thus it looked like apps are not the driving force behind one's decision to buy a smartphone in general or of a particular brand.

Yesterday, I was invited to join a web forum where I could chat with other professionals on web design and development. I signed up, and put in a simple password when asked, but was told to pick a "complex password". After putting in several possibilities (and being annoyingly rejected), I finally was allowed in. The very first thing I did was ask the Administrator to turn that function off.

In this crazy world of stolen identities, why would I ask for that? Especially with my larger experiences in the World Wide Web. The answer is that it wasn't necessary for a message forum to have it. You always have to think about what information you're handing to a site, and does it then garner the need for a complex password system.

I had an interesting debate recently with a colleague. She's a very experienced media producer, and we recently collaborated to completely overhaul her website and personal branding. It was a chance again for me to implement much of the technology I put into this very website into her website. We hit a snag though when it came to her production experience in web media. She ran into the issue where all her past work was not online anymore as live websites.

My colleague wanted me to somehow take past web work and create functioning mockups of these past sites that would sit on her web host space, and thus she would link potential clients to them as examples of her work. The mockups would basically be a few pages that would make one believe this is the actual built site.

I personally think it's a bad idea in this case, but she made a valid point that in this economy, employers are looking for any tiny ridiculous reason to knock you off the long list of qualified applicants for one opening, thus she felt having no actual live work online and only showing screenshots would hurt her chances of landing work. I still beg to differ.