CMS Ideas

Hmm... lets see.

I initially began with wordpress, and it lasted for about 2 years. Wordpress is one of the easiest CMSes to maintain and update. A lot of the stuff that you have to do in other CMSes is automated in Wordpress, and that just makes it easy to update your site, and so on. Practically, you only have to set the settings, and you will never ever have to touch the settings again. All you will ever need then will be in the 'posts' tab. Almost every function you will ever need can be added via wordpress plugins.

At the same time, Wordpress is not a good cnoice for larger sites. Wordpress is highly unefficient, and heavier than most CMSes. I would estimate that it is 2-4 times heavier. Since its heavier, its also much slower. Wordpress is also too "one click". Most of the options and features are so self automated that it greatly reduces the amount of customization that can be done to it. However, in the end, Wordpress wasn't worth it. I only own two dual Quad Xenon's in colocation, and Wordpress was eating up a lot of the CPU that I needed for some of my projects.

After Wordpress, I moved on to drupal. Moving to Drupal was kind of a mistake, really. I had heard about how light Drupal is, and its high level of customization. However, Drupal is geared towards being 'Professional' CMS. There are MILLIONS of options, and everything is configurable. There are practically no 'one-click' settings here. Just to make the front page in the blog form, you will have to create your own 'view'. In addition, drupal has the least plugins. as with professional CMSes, it is expected that you code your own plugins. I eventually couldn't stand maintaining it anymore. After a month or so, I dropped Drupal, and moved on to Joomla.

Joomla is the current CMS that I am using. Joomla basically provides a balance between Drupal and Wordpress. Its configurable & customizable, but not to the level of Drupal, where it becomes hard to maintain. Joomla is quite fast to be honest, and can compare with the speed of Drupal. So far, every plugin/feature ive ever needed has been avaliable on the joomla site. Joomla has plenty of themes as well. I currently don't have any problems with joomla, other than the fact that there is no good CDN/CACHING system like they have on Wordpress (W3 Total Cache). But I use advanced routing now, so that doesn't matter. Joomla is also missing some of the major plugins that are avaliable for wordpress such as NextGen Gallery. I really adored that in Wordpress, but I am in the process of moving to picassa web.

In the end, it really depends on what you need.