Ask Slashdot: What's The Best CMS?

Slashdot reader pipingguy recently inherited a 2012 installation of Joomla 1.5.26, and while performing four years worth of updates, began wondering about other content management systems. I've built more than a few static websites (I use Sublime Text 3 or Atom, not some fancy-pants WYSIWYG doohickey) and am quite familiar with CSS, but databases not so much. I've been through lots of online documentation and am a bit bewildered, but I'm following the recommendations regarding backups and the like.

What are Slashdot readers' latest opinions on the three most popular CMSes -- Drupal, Joomla and WordPress? Any tips for me before I accidentally blow away the existing site and have to rebuild everything...?
Leave your educated opinions in the comments...

Comments

Drupal

[techsoldaten]

So, I agree with any advice about finding a decision table and making up your own mind. Take what they have to say with a grain of salt, however, and realize each table has it's own focus which may or may not be what is important to you.

That said, Drupal is the best CMS right now, and it's doing work to stay in that role for a long time to come.

From a usability perspective, the core team has done a lot of work to make it simpler to work with Drupal and interact with content. It's very easy to spin up new content types, add fields, and create pages / widgets that present that information. Now that views is in core, you can actually author a site using only drag-and-drop tools. Which is great for people just looking to get a single site up and running.

From a technical perspective, symphony is now installed as part of core, which opens a whole lot of possibilities around what you can actually do with it. One of my favorite features is the CMI initiative, which allows you to author a site using a config file, and use that to spin up lots and lots of sites. Which is great for enterprises, looking to adopt a CMS in a big way.

From an extensibility perspective, one of the most powerful features in the platform is native support for REST and JSON. Drupal can serve as a provider of data for single page applications, where people author content in Drupal and you load it through apps authored in Angular / Ember / React. Drupal simply serves as an API endpoint in this context, which allows you to pull data from it whenever you need it.

I realize you can do these things with Wordpress as well, but not as easily or as scalably. Whenever you get past trivial use cases, there's always something getting in the way with Wordpress that makes it less appealing. And other commercial enterprise content management systems, like SiteCore, are simply not extensible. The moment you go outside the sandbox they set up for you, it becomes very hard to make them work.