I Need a Good Open Source CMS

A couple of years ago when I started looking for a content management system (cms) to adopt, I ultimately went with WordPress. After very briefly looking at Joomla and Drupal I wrote them off. The documentation wasn’t great for either platform and the admin user interfaces were cluttered and confusing. WordPress on the other hand served most of my needs, has great documentation and the user experience in its admin section is far superior to the other two platforms.

However, I had to go through 20 hours of Drupal training last week at work. My perception of Drupal has changed as a result. Seeing the functionality available within Drupal and the limitations of WordPress led me to once again give Drupal a try. Yet once again, the user interface turned me off. I went through 20 hours of training and still had questions at the end. What will happen when I hand the site off to clients? Plus most of the things that initially impressed me (like Views) aren’t all that useful for people with decent PHP/MySQL skills.

So my quest has led me to find a cms with the ease of use (for both developers and administrators) of WordPress and the power of Drupal. Unfortunately, no such product seems to exist in the open source world. ExpressionEngine is the closest thing that I have been able to find, but at $299 per site I’m a little hesitant to give it a try.