Complex online communities, web portals, and other web applications such as SaaS (software-as-a-service) should rarely be taken off the shelf. The simple reason is that these types of projects are almost always customized beyond the capabilities of any off-the-shelf platform.
Web applications are typically called “applications” because of the problems they solve and the customized tools and methods used to solve them. There is rarely a reason why such an application would be taken off the shelf.
