Your CMS preference?

I am a fan of Textpattern and Expresssion Engine.

 

I'm a lover of WordPress. If it can't do something out of the box, there's likely one of it's many thousands of plugins which can help. And as you say, it's so much easier for clients to get to grips with than many other CMSs.

Let us know which route you choose and how it turns out

Doug

 

Drupal here. There is indeed a learning curve, but it's flexible and well maintained.

 

My favorite is SilverStripe. Not as widely used or known, but I love the flexibility it gives me as a developer and it is pretty user-friendly, too.

Side note -- Ruby on Rails is framework, not really a CMS. It would be comparable to Cake, Symfony or Yii (frameworks for PHP).

 

STEP AWAY FROM THE JOOMLA, do not touch it.

Might be harsh, but I've found it convoluted, poorly documented and not worth the effort when there seem to be many better options around.

 

+ 1 for SilverStripe, it is the CMS for software developers. The thing about SilverStripe is that although it has a GUI CMS for setting up pages, I like it more for its robust ORM and PHP framework features.

I wrote jaredandkaylie.com in SilverStripe

 

We always felt we were limited by certain open source projects, so we built our own. We have limitations on some of our remote systems, but we have no limits to the customizations in our proprietary CMS.

 

concrete5

I'm the creator and lead developer behind concrete5. It's an open source CMS written in PHP. In-context editing, easy to extend, marketplace of free and commercial add-ons/themes, the whole shebang:

http://www.concrete5.org

 

I now use WordPress for my site, after trying to get used to Joomla, CMS Made Simple, Silver Stripe, and a few home brew solutions. WordPress as a CMS is great for very simple stuff, but the more complex you get, the less suitable it becomes. There are plugins that extend its functionality in all kinds of ways, but it begins to feel like a Rube Goldberg machine if you are trying to get to something very specific by throwing two or three plugins together.

Having said that, the site I maintain is fairly simple and needs to be administer-able (is that a word?) by people with limited IT knowledge, so WordPress fits the bill.

 

Drupal for me as well. We've created prototype web sites with all the bells and whistles (points, badges, rules, social media, forums, inbox, etc.) in next to no time. We were also able to create custom modules that tied into very regimented systems.

I haven't had a chance to look at 7 yet.

 

I tried a few of the CMS systems and found them not to fit my needs so i run my own CMS built on Zend Framework for my clients.