ZarettoThis is really quite an old article now, so I'm keeping it here really for archive purposes. If anything the scene has moved on quite a lot since I originally wrote this in 2006. Basically now it's either Drupal, CrowdFusion or native PHP for me. Wordpress is really good at what it does, but what it does is generally not what I need.
As web developers and programmers we tend to favour the approach of dynamic data driven websites (usually from a SQL DB). We find that it makes our life simpler, and enables our clients to edit their content in safety. In essence all of the CMS systems listed below do much of the same thing, and choosing one is often driven by client preference or by a requirements survey analysis.
We have been responsible for the deployment and installation of sites we refer to as CMS (including corporate blogging sites with Wordpress), and equally have developed comparable, but bespoke systems that achieve similar results. Our philosophy is to provide the best solution possible, and sometimes this is dictated by more than technical considerations.
A personal view
Given a typical site and a free hand we'd almost certainly end up with either a very thin PHP layer over DB driven content, or Drupal. From our experience we view the many solutions as options to fufill the requirements, and we strongly believe in making the best use of the technology that is available. Sometimes this means that a longer period is spent during the project initiation phase to assess and select, as after all most of the CMS/blog packages provide very similar capabilities and facilities, so choosing is often driven by requirements other than technical.
We have kind feelings towards Joomla, Drupal, to briefly summarise our experience of these systems:
- Drupal
Easy to install and configure, generally well coded, good security and permissions system, lots of modules and themes, good documentation. Definitely our favourite.
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e107
Easy installation and configuration, wide selection of themes and modules, very flexible.
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Joomla!
Very easy to install and use with lots of extensions and modules, the documentation is exhaustive and concise admin user interface is intuitive and powerful, the backend of is very usable and the content editor is good. We've had good success with Joomfish and VirtueMart.
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XOOPS
Minimalist initial install Provides lots of addon modules and themes Lots of functionality Mature and has a very good permissions system