I was looking for a good cms system for a long time. And i really could not find one. I was playing with ez publish and joomla and basically i was depressed. I have never seen more confusing and user-unfriendly systems in my life! Especially joomla is a huge surprise. How in the world did it become so popular?

Any way if you are considering a new cms you might find some tips here.

I was looking for a good cms system for a long time. And i really could not find one. I was playing with ez publish and joomla and basically i was depressed. I have never seen more confusing and user-unfriendly systems in my life! Especially joomla is a huge surprise. How in the world did it become so popular? I have no idea.

Any way, i had to develop a new on using cakePHP for my previous company and it was cool. I really liked the cakePHP framework and the result was quite good as well. It was tailor made so gave us all the stuff we needed and allowed hosting multiple clients with multiple languages on the same platform with vary nice templating approach.

I was looking for a new open source system around sep.2008 again as our company needed a knowledge base site for our customers etc. And again! frustration and sadness. All the solutions we reviewed were really bad or just horrible. Nothing really changed over the years. How is it possible that you cant find any really great cms in php? don't know.

UPS! ... i spoke too soon ;-) actually during research we found out a really nice one ..... TAM TA TA TAM! ... DRUPAL! (podcast should provide better sound effects). But seriously its really nice.

The version we are working with now is 6.6 and its quite nice. the only problem is the initial learning curve. You get just a very simple setup that does not let you anything without external plugins (modules). And to make it worse there are thousands of them! literally thousands. So you might spend a while before you figure out which modules you need and what functions do they give.

To make life easier for some people i might write a few more articles here just to list what you get from which module and how to get your way through first weeks of work with it. I mean weeks because some of the modules are pretty powerful and you might need a day or two to figure out how to use it properly (if you need advanced features). Simple setups should be straightforward.

Drupal is not object oriented and seems bit sloppy at first but its actually quite well written. I mean its consistent and gets the job done. Considering amount of functionality you get with some of the modules you will be amazed by the flexibility. Writing 0 lines of code should still let you make sites with lots of features.

Even if you have to write some code its not painful at all. There is a lot of doc how to do it and api lets you perform all sorts of thing.

So for now on Drupal i my number one in php cms world and i recommend it as its a nice system once you get to know it.