Thanks go out to Dana Ouellette for sharing this objective review of the three top CMS platforms. I think following concluding statements from foliovision confirm what other sites and personal experience reveal regarding:
Drupal
For a very large commercial project, I can see a justification for choosing Drupal. On a big project, most of your expense will be custom development anyway – everything has to be optimised and integrated – so you don’t much care one way or another about a myriad of plugins which you will probably not use.
WordPress
WordPress is the platform of choice in my opinion for the small, medium or large business. Whatever holes you can find in WordPress (editorial management process, page management, ecommerce, membership site) are easily solved with high quality plugins.
My reference to “somebody who regularly develops in WordPress” was really to Alec Kinnear the author of the review you linked too.
I don’t find it surprising that somebody who regularly develops in WordPress (and apparently not in Drupal or Joomla) claims that WordPress is the best choice.
The review of WordPress is interesting to say the least: The statement “Lots of popular but seriously broken plugins which will cripple your website performance forever and make it nearly impossible for you to cleanly upgrade.” clearly negates the advantages of “Great plugin architecture.” and “Plugins for everything.”.
I actually don’t develop in WordPress–I simply use it for my blog and we used it at ACU as an alternative to Blackboard or Moodle and also as a portfolio platform. When I was developing websites, started in the 90’s I coding everything manually then started using Cold Fusion, Xope, Xoops, and many platforms. In the past 6-7 years I have used Mambo, and then Joomla and have experimented with many other CMS platforms. I have always stressed the importance in finding a platform that is very user friendly and until Drupal 7 came out Drupal was never a consideration because it is not the easiest platform to use. It is the popular platform for programmers and hardcore developers but is really only sustainable if you have very deep website budget because the average user often finds it challenging to use so you have to depend on your developers for everything.
There will always be trade offs with whatever CMS platform you choose. WordPress is very user friendly but its weakness is the plugins. Because it is an easier platform to develop for there are less proficient developers that are able to create plugins and can cause problems. The key to dealing with this is not to run questionable or “broken” plugins and to fully test all plugins before they are deployed.