I have absolutely no experience working with content management systems and have been researching a good system to start developing with. No specific project in mind, I am just trying to grasp the overall development concepts of a popular content management system. My experience consists of HTML/CSS, very basic PHP, and some Java.
I have it narrowed down to Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress. From the information I have gathered, Drupal has a steeper learning curve, WordPress has a large and ready set of theme resources, and Joomla brings a bit more simplicity for beginning developers.
Does anyone have any positive experiences to share?
I usually use either WordPress or ExpressionEngine when an off-the-shelf CMS is appropriate. WordPress is great when you can just create or customize a theme and when a site’s data relationships aren’t overly complex. ExpressionEngine has been great for larger sites, and is great with complicated/dynamic relationships thanks to great add-ons like Playa and Matrix.
I’m also a relatively huge fan of ExpressionEngine’s community; great support, active forums, and some nice/talented people. I’ve only worked with Drupal a few times and didn’t like it because of the steeper learning curve, and it’s not as cleanly focused on HTML and CSS so it’s a bit harder when you have a front-end design team to work with that may not be great with PHP.
I have zero experience with Joomla outside of some demos, so if it’s awesome than I’m missing out. Like Drupal, its admin panel is just ugly and so I’ve never been attracted to it. A lot of great open source projects seem to be tragically ugly, and it’s rarely worth the extra time to develop a skin if theming is even a priority.
I’ve used all of them, and would advise using Drupal.
WordPress is nice, but I don’t like developing on top of it. I use WordPress for the really simple sites that require nothing more than extremely basic Content Management. Which is why I use WordPress for my personal site which is just a blog.
Drupal is great. The out of the box Modules whcih you can get for Durpal makes it almost impossible to need to develop anything for. There are SOOOO many modules that have already been created for Drupal that you will really be hard pressed to not find a module which already does what it is you require.
Views, Panels, Contexts, Omega/Alpha Templates, Fields, WebForms, honestly, with all of these modules available to you, you can create practically any site that you need.
Joomla, I’m sorry to say it, but that bubble burst nearly a decade ago. I wouldn’t advise anyone to use Joomla.
If you are looking for other CMS’s that you haven’t yet looked into… a few you might want to are, ModxCMS, ExpressionEngine (as Matt recommended), and SilverStripe.
From my experience working with a handful of WordPress and Joomla sites, I would suggest starting with WordPress. The learning curve is much smaller and I’ve found WordPress documentation more helpful than the Joomla documentation. Unless the development you want to do requires the larger/more flexible Joomla or Drupal framework, start with WordPress for the sake of simplicity.