This has been bugging me for a while now, and it's one of the main reasons I'm not keen on giving people a 'pre-made' CMS system as a web designer. By that I mean the usual off-the-shelf opensource solutions. CMSmadesimple, Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress etc.
How do you deal with the long term maintenance of the site's code? Do you encourage the client to pay you some kind of fee to keep their site up to date in the future, thus creating a potential steady stream of income - or do you attempt to leave it as their responsibility.
The way I'm currently thinking of explaining it is that it's best to think of the software their website is running on as similiar to anti-virus on their own computer. You can leave it to run in its original state, but without updates it increasingly becomes vulnerable to exploitation. This does sound harsh - but it at least gets the point across.
The flaws with getting them to do it is that if you have used 3rd party plugins, things could go horribly wrong when they patch their website up to a newer version and an obsolete plugin goes haywire. Not only that but you would have to have a pretty tech-savvy individual on the client side to handle major wordpress updates.
So really you need to convince them its best to come back every six months or so for maintenance? Or sod the whole update thing and put in the small print somewhere that they are being given an opensource solution in its current state and that any future problems with the software are not the responsibility of the designer.
Currently this worries me so much that I'm thinking of jacking in the service of opensource-run CMS sites, sticking to just the front end coding - and working out bespoke build on a client-by-client basis with a developer.
The only downside to this is that this is a pricey option, and would put off a fairly large number of small-to-middle weight clients who don't have that much cash to hand.
Thoughts?
Or failing thoughts... any good PHP CMS developers want to PM me for possible work options in the near future?
