[Wayne Luke]

Tried it back when it was Mambo.. Didn't like it.

It split off and became Joomla and was supposed to be easier. Tried the 1.5 version and didn't like it. Moreover didn't want to spend the learning curve on how to use it or spend hundreds of dollars for the addons needed to do what I want. Someone will say there are free addons but none of the ones I tried work or they were complete garbage that looked like they were coded by a 3 year old. Only addons that seem to work are the expensive ones. One company wanted $150/year to add a recipe database to a site. I would have been willing to pay $50.00 if it was good but not $150.00.

Anyway, after Joomla, tried Drupal. It was better. More modules and more were free. However the 5.X system is a hell of a pain to style whereas 6.X didn't have the modules and had an inefficient menuing system that caused hundreds of queries if you wanted to use custom menus. Actually thousands of queries with the menu setup that I had. Somehow menus with 24 categories with 8 primary and an average of 3 secondary categories each resulted in 5800 queries on page view in the 6.X version whereas it was only 120 queries per page in the 5.x series. Developing and using Drupal on the site would have also required too much maintenance as there is a security notification at least every 3 days and you need to know PHP.

Then I tried Wordpress. Most will tell you this is a just a blogging platform. But if it is only a blogging platform, it is the most powerful one in the world today. With some theme changes and maybe a couple of addons you can turn it into a powerful CMS as well. Themes are easy to manipulate even with little knowledge of PHP. You can do most of it right in a single CSS file though there are thousands of free and commercial themes available off the shelf. From there you can add widgets, plugins and template filters to make it do what you want. A magazine site that I worked on for 6 months in Drupal, took 6 hours to replicate with Wordpress and that included reading the documentation, downloading the software and figuring out how to use widgets and plugins. The only issue with Wordpress is that its user permission system is a little lacking off the shelf because it wasn't meant to be used by multiple users. Luckily there are a couple of plugins that can fix this in about 30 seconds for you. Literally 30 seconds from download to live on the site with the new version.

Anyway... Drupal shows potential and the big push with development is to make it usable by common people. I continue to follow the project. However Wordpress stands out and can handle a wide variety of sites. Even has a vBulletin bridge available on this site. The power of Wordpress is often overlooked because it is a "Blogging" platform.