After spending years building pages directly in HTML and PHP, I cannot tell you how welcome CMS has been for me personally. I can create web sites and allow clients to update their own content.

Now the real question is which CMS to use when creating sites. I have tried and experienced them all. The four big dogs are: Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and Mambo. There are others but none with the community that these four have.

I continually come back to Wordpress (especially after version 2.5). Joomla and Mambo are much more robust out of the box. If you have a large need for a site with login, member areas, etc. these may be for you. I have two sites that I still have up with Joomla: http://www.bigdaymedia.com and http://www.need2tri.com. With that said, the interface is fairly complicated and not nearly as user friendly as others. In addition there just isn’t nearly the community that supports either of these tools for plug-ins, themes, etc. that others has.

I wanted to love Drupal. Really I did. It had much of the larger functionality that Joomla and Drupal had without the complicated administration. There is quite a bit of flexibility in its offering and a bigger support network in themes and other modules. As I continued to play around with it, I wasn’t sure I dug all the complete user interface that it contained. Granted that it had more flexibility out of the box than Wordpress, it married the site with the admin. So when I was logged in as a user the entire site looked different (i.e. new menus, edit tabs, etc.) I like being able to have a separate area for administration and still watch what it looks like to the end user. Drupal could not do this. On top of this while the administration was definitely easier than Joomla or Mambo, it paled in comparison to Wordpress’ easy-to-use process.

And thus my personal champion of CMS products: Wordpress. Wordpress was initially created purely for personal blogs and some of that foundation remains in place. And I don’t think that is a bad thing. The administration section was built so anyone could use it. Add lots of functionality to that easy interface, the largest community of free themes, plug-ins and support and you have the best option for most CMS shoppers. The greatest part is the flexibility for those that want to dig deeper. I can use the great interface and make changes to the code in the back without ever having to open files in text pads or other utilities. A wonderful feature.

The reason for this whole article?

I purchased joelhaugen.com and really wanted to be different there. I strived to use Drupal to show my versatility but I’m giving up and reverting back to what I know best. Ah well…