I have found that there are limitations to all of these, I prefer Drupal for ease of themeing and control, but I also found that WordPress and Joomla have nice advantages, especially in usability. But, if you don’t know where your going, then you will run into pitfalls with all of these. Joomla is not really a great community based CMS (social networking) and I find that WordPress is limited in how far you can get it to work without serious modification.

I hate to say this, but if you are not a programmer, why would you develop on any of these? No matter how “easy” things seem to a computer science major, if you barely know HTML, etc – you have no business developing on a professional level.

All of these are really made for professional developers, because they are developed by professionals. I personally believe that the most important step to identifying a CMS is that you find someone who is an expert, so you can gain valuable consultation on how to use and maintain your site.

A CMS is not a magic pill, there is still a huge learning curve, even for site admins and power user, point is – any CMS is a good solution if it addresses the scope of your business now and into the future.

Customer wants a website. He also wants to be found easily on Google, and didn’t realise it but it would be nice to communicate with his customers in the form of a newsletter. It would also be nice if more of his customers would express their requests via email which is faster than by phone.

I build him something in wordpress with a small blog and plug in mailpress and cforms.
He writes a bi-weekly news article, and drives his present customers to his site. He retains these customers because through his newsletters, they understand his company and its products better. With the extra articles he gets indexed better and receives more queries from would be customers. People also realise the nice form on his site, and start to use it for queries.

The higher costs of the development is offset through 1. Customer retention, 2. Higher sales, 3. better productivity.

This solution works no matter how small the company, and how basic its services.

As to which cms to use, personal choice and functionality I suppose.

Also, if I can’t understand and figure out how to design a theme for a CMS in an hour, I don’t bother with it. Making your product easy is how you gain and retain customers.

‘Not Difficult’ is an extremely relative term. Maybe not difficult for you. Sure was difficult for me. How do you design a website? Everyone i know uses some kind of image program…like Photoshop or maybe even Illustrator. They base it on some kind of grid (960,etc). Then you chop it up to the web. Using HTML, and CSS.

For many, many, many sites that’s all you need to do. Why on earth would you install a CMS (or a blog system like WordPress) just to make the home page and the about page of a 7 page website editable? Why would that site need to pull content from a database? Why would that site need a fully custom CSS? What if you had designed a really unique layout that didn’t fit into the a standard 3 or 4 column grid.

When I say ‘Not Difficult’ i mean 5 minutes. That’s how long PageLime integration takes, if that. We are not the choice if you want to run a very content heavy dynamic site that changes every 5 minutes.

If you are a construction company that wants to keep your rates up to date, or a clothing boutique that wants to post new specials and update images of your inventory, or a 13 year old thinking about starting up a babysitting company and just wants to be able to change a list of current dates of availability so her perspective clients hire her. Why would these businesses need Drupal, WordPress, or Joomla? Why should they have to learn to code or use Dreamweaver?

If you are a web developer who wants to give your clients who do similar professions to the latter examples…a simple interface that handles all there needs, that works right out of the box, that you never have to upgrade because it’s a service and upgrades across all sites at once, and basically simplifies content management down to the level of Microsoft Word. You should check out PageLime.

I have no problem with the CMS’s mentioned in the article. I do have a problem with opensource CMS zealots who act like they are the only solution to the problem. That for some reason you need to have every feature possible on sites that don’t need that many. It’s not about features, its not about Opensource, it’s about the benefits to your clients and picking the correct tools for the correct jobs. Sometimes these are right, but sometimes they are not. The internet needs to stop acting like these big 3 are the be all end all of content management just because some people have spent years getting used to integrating. If your grocery store was across the street, you wouldn’t get in your car and drive there, sometimes it’s faster to just walk. That’s why we created PageLime.

How are you forced into a template with any opensource CMS? You know as well as anyone else that will read this article that theming for any of the major opensource CMS’ in this article is not a difficult task if you know PHP, XHTML and CSS…

-Tom Twitter: @pagelime

P.S. We also spent a lot of time on the UI. We know how important impressing clients is.