Drupal versus your own CMS
As of now this site is currently based on the free content management system called Drupal. The CMS is highly advanced and has a lot of support from bedroom/professional coders so if there is one obscure plug-in offering a specific set of functionality for your site you can be pretty sure you will find one already made for Drupal.
With that said when you try to please everyone things can become quite large and complex which anyone will notice who begins to customize Drupal beyond adding modules.
So I have actually been thinking of finishing my half finished CMS I made back in the summer of 2006.
I have been thinking of including:
Ad rotation – so ads show up in random pre specified places on the template.
Large, content rich footer – modern footers are more complex than your typical one line of the obligatory email address, copyright notice and year. I want to be able to show the last few posts on the site, the last comments, the most viewed articles at the moment and also ads – and that is just the beginning.
Faster page loads – You can tweak Drupal to be faster, no matter how much I tweak I still think a homemade system will be faster.
More control of page/content – Well this is self explanatory. It is obvious that you will get more control with a system you have coded yourself.
There are actually good things with Drupal to.
For example there is a specific sitemap module that automatically builds a sitemap.xml file in your site root when you add articles. I noticed almost instantly how much faster Googlebot visited my pages after having installed that module. However you could actually code a similar function yourself but as always it is a matter of time versus money.