If you have to stick with PHP, use PIMCORE or roll your own with Zend.

Typo3 is a pig. Don’t try to use it unless you have a lot of serious resources. Joomla is a bad joke. A total nightmare. Wordpress is fine for a blog (if you don’t mind being pwned), but a bad idea for a complex site. Use blog software for blogs, not for other kinds of sites. CMS Made Simple was headed in the right direction, but then they ditched their “let’s re-architect this like sane people” 2.0 project, and most of the best people have left the building. If they sold stock, I’d short it. Does anyone seriously look at projects like MODx or Website Baker? If so, they need help.

I used to use Drupal a few years back, before I had been introduced to these other frameworks and tools. I thought it was the bees knees, you can install these modules and override just about everything. But when I started working with other platforms I quickly changed my mind.

Drupal takes the worst aspects of a framework and combines them with the worst aspects of a CMS. Configuration is a huge pain in the ass, since it’s stored in the database. It’s generally hard to use and slow. The api is very procedural and ugly.
The queries for your content will usually do over 5 or 6 joins, which is horrendously slow.

Drupal is for people who want to build a whole website by clicking buttons. You could say it is the Dreamweaver of the CMS world. Developers are far better off using a framework where your work is done with clean code. If you use version control this is a huge win. Maybe if you’re not a developer it will be good for you because of this. However it is not a tool any professional should ever use.

Django or Silverstripe introduced me to clean object relational mapping, classes, simple templating (Drupal templates are very hard) and scaffolding. I prefer Django, because python is far superior to PHP, and the community is much larger. However silverstripe is both a great CMS and framework for content driven websites. To be honest I think Silverstripe stole a few ideas of Django. In either of these frameworks one just quickly write some fields into a model class and have the administration backend generate the forms and navigation to manage the content. Compare that with clicking 20 times to make your CCK model in Drupal.

Django, Rails, C# .NET are all used for large *dynamic* websites. Just because the white house puts up a news site they cache the shit out of doesn’t mean Drupal is a good solution. Also, PHP sucks balls. It’s 2011, move on from this legacy language. Until the Drupal fanboys have given the alternatives a try they should STFU.

In fact the company I work for uses Python so I’m learning Python because I, like the author of this post think that for some projects writing your own is better than trying to bend a CMS to your requirements.

Python seems quite good so far, and Django is meant to be a good framework too.

It all comes down to what you are trying to achieve and what your budget is. For simple sites that only require minor updates every so often simple CMS’s look good. For complex community driven sites Drupal may be the trick. Each project will have different needs so you can’t paint them all with the same brush.

I will say that I’ll never use Joomla ever and I mean ever! Life is too short to use bad software.

Having been part of a team that has rescued many failed Drupal sites, we know what it looks like when the wrong people get their hands on it, and yes it can turn into a nightmare. However if you know what you are doing, Drupal is a dream to use, and actually really helps budgeting and project planning.

Strangely, my most lucrative clients ARE Drupal clients, who constantly call me confused and needing repair or support.

And are you confused and in need of repair?