ergophobe - 12:25 am on Dec 12, 2009 (gmt 0)

I've used several and have vicarious experiences with another (i.e. my wife uses it). The "why" varies with the task.

- built my own - a few of these because I didn't like anything out there or I wanted some special function. I haven't done this in a long time.

- Drupal - I tried a bunch and the underlying code was often poor. I always test with PHP error reporting set to E_ALL and any open source app that fails that doesn't get installed. It's a sign of other problems in my opinion. Drupal was the only open source CMS I could find that even tried to meet that test at the time. Others were terrible, but Joomla for example has been totally rewritten since that time and I hear very good things about the now not so new Joomla core.

I liked the level of abstraction that Drupal offered. For example, taxonomy, URL structure, menus, breadcrumbs can all be independent of each other. It might take some sweat, but you can build the site you want to, not the site Drupal has in mind.

I also liked that, unlike some other systems, it had powerful theming, but without requiring you to learn another language (Gallery, for example, used Smarty, which always seems utterly pointless to me).

Lots of flexibility. At the time, at least, Joomla had whacky limitations, like you could only have your taxonomy go three levels deep. Huh? So Electronics -> Computers -> Laptops and then you were stuck!

I could go on, but all that said, now there are so many quality competitors, if I were starting over, who knows what I would default to. I think many have matched Drupal in the areas I mention, but through force of habit, I default to Drupal for sites that will be complex.

And for other sites... Wordpress - if you want a blog that's just a blog, it's simple and easy. If you keep it up to date, recent versions are reasonably secure (most security breaches are with out of date versions). Of course you can do a lot more with WP, but if it gets more complex like that, I personally go for Drupal, but I know another member here (lorax) has tried both Drupal and Wordpress and he came down on the other side and defaults to Wordpress unless he really has a good reason not to, and he has certainly built some quality sites on that platform.

Otherwise, I have played with a bunch. So many are good, but it depends on your needs. Concrete5 would be great for a brochure site with content pages, maybe some forms to collect user data of various sorts (they have a great form tool). ModX is cool. Silverstreak, CMS Made Simple (or Made Easy?). I know people who like Wikimedia. And obviously the old standards like Expression Engine and Joomla.