@jnix284 wrote:
We've been using HubSpot CMS since 2016 and have undergone two redesigns, mostly to take full advantage of the changes to the CMS and incorporate HubDB.
I worked with HubSpot Agency Partners for the development on both, but the biggest project was leveraging HubDB to create dynamic pages (still in progress for some of our minor content) which has really streamlined our process for keeping content updated (specifically for us, as homebuilders our plans, communities and available homes for sale change on an almost daily basis).
The CMS backend has been easy enough for me to make minor updates on my own with minimal HTML/CSS experience, but the use of modules and templates has been a huge advantage and cost savings for us to get the site updated with a consistent look/feel.
Here is my biggest complaint - marketplace templates are built from head to footer, so if there is a layout you really like for content, it is near impossible to get the branding aligned for the header/footer without help from a developer to untangle the CSS and merge everything together. There has to be a way to build marketplace templates with a placeholder header/footer, but allow for a global header/footer to be applied that can override it. Everything else is plug and play with little technical knowledge. Same is true with email templates, if my team likes a new layout, I have to edit the CSS first to align with our brand before they can start using it. Modules were recently added to the marketplace, which I think is heading in the right direction, but I haven't tried one yet.
@jnix284 This is just poor coding. It's an artifact of a bigger problem within HubSpot. That there aren't any actual good developers that serve this platform. Why would there be? Why would any developer waste their time throwing hundreds of hours into something on HubSpot when I could make something significantly more viable, with a better market / audience, and a fraction of the time on another CMS whilst building more performant / better pages that are significantly more maintanble?
So, what you end up with in HubSpot is a bunch of "developers" from agencies that are really marketers cross-trained with little / if any formal development background or training whose extent of development experience is being able to drag-and-drop a few landing pages together or hack together some contrived CSS.
This is also an artifact of the fact that HubSpot is for marketers so said marketing agencies aren't development shops. and ship client requests out with minimal standards. If you had decent devs maybe you get something good, but you don't. A marketing company simply doesn't have the captial to actually pay any good developer an appropriate salary.
So, what you end up with are exactly what I described above - devs that are signficantly worse than other sectors or novices just getting started desperate for a job and don't mind being over-leveraged / taken advantage of by said marketing companies. There's a few decent Hubspot devs out there, but none that actively participate in the marketplace or provide products for the front-end side of things due to my first point.
Even if they did..... little secret...... building anything truly useful and good in HubSpot is so unbelievably over-complicated due to poor product decisions from a development standpoints that limits devs in what they can build to a point it's just not even worth it. So, the marketplace is flooded with poor products of off-shored ones which naturally come with lots of problems the same as most off-shored development deliverables that you'll realize are fundamentally flawed ~6 months down the road.
You can absolutely do what ou describe it's just a headache and not worth my time to build because of how hubspot is structured.
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