Hi Jay,
I've used many CMS's in the past and have written my own in various languages (php, java, python) and somehow I found them all lacking after a while of use. Let me explain:
1. the simple ones are really simple to use at the beginning. they install in the blink of an eye, there are thousands of nice themes and content is added without any hassle. You think you're in heaven .... until you want to do something that isn't supported out of the box. Then you begin to search the contributed modules, then you find one that 'almost' does what you want but not quite.. then you find that what you want to do isn't possible with that cms at all and you find yourself in hell...
2. the tough ones like Drupal don't make it easy for you. You have to know a lot about your server operating system, database, webserver setup, etc. (although some webhosts nowadays have a system called "Fantastico" which makes this setup with 3 mouse clicks!). Once it's installed you don't know where to enter your content, it doesn't appear in the places you want, themes look bad or there are now nice themes at all available. You think you are in hell, because nothing makes sense to you. Let me tell you, if this is how you start, it can only get better, can't it?
I felt like this with Drupal. Everytime I installed it I hated it. Nothing felt right. Then I did some research on the net to make a choice between Joomla, Drupal or Typo3, the biggest open source CMS out there. It seemed to be a close draw between Drupal and Joomla, with Joomla being favoured among designers and arty people, and Drupal clearly favored by programmers.
Now I'm a programmer so I thought I'ld go with Drupal and then I sat down and threw all my preconceptions of how a CMS SHOULD work overboard and learned the Drupal Way of doing things. Since then every day I jump up and cry THIS ROCKS! it's amazing, I find things that Drupal can do that I know would have been really hard in any other CMS I used before. Now I feel stupid for not going with Drupal ages ago.
So you're not a programmer? Doesn't matter. The reason why you should choose a programmer centric CMS anyway is that most of you want to have will have to be provided by contributed modules. And these modules are written by ... programmers! So if you go with a CMS which has a superior programming architecture then you will find that the modules contributed to it are also of very high quality.
Pfew, a long first post. I will conclude that probably someone of the Joomla camp can write the same long passionate article about Joomla
but that's ok, that's why there are hundreds of different CMS out there one for everyone....
Cheers,
Carsten.
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