Intensively working with Drupal during the past two weeks, I find it to be an excellent tool, and also much more than a YACMS.

Now I think that Drupal is also a framework – providing invisible to developer caching, session handling, access control, theming, localization, and more. The minimal effort required to extend already huge Drupal functionality is to write your own module – and, if done right, your module will immediately benefit from all the bonuses Drupal provides.

But Drupal also really shines as a CMS! You can start with a free design theme, and without any PHP knowledge have your custom portal built within a week – with your own hands, if you desire! (Note: “within a week” is true, but only if you already know what exactly you should be doing; learning time is short, but it’s not within that same week.)

What makes Drupal so powerful? I’d say that beautiful core and numerous modules.

What Drupal has to offer?

In theming, it uses by default PHPTemplate engine. It’s simple – just HTML, with PHP tags inserted where dynamic content should go. It’s logical – you have separate layout files for the whole page, for blocks, for content (nodes), etc. That won’t be an exaggeration, if I say that Drupal themes support allows 95% of designs to be easily implemented. (5% go to static xHTML and ExpressionEngine )

You also have blocks in Drupal. Blocks might be the oldest component of almost all CMSs, but the power of Drupal is that you have full CSS control over blocks. And you can also individually control the HTML of any block – using the same PHPTemplate files, as for general Drupal theming!

CCK, content construction kit, is the candidate module for the inclusion into Drupal core. It allows you to actually construct content types the way you want. If you have a custom-designed web-site with several differently displayed sections – just create new content type for each section, and add only the information needed for each section’s content items! Then show your content, using theming. Or using contemplate module – which is a “visual editor for content display themes”. That’s purely point-and-click.

Views module is another shotgun in the powerful arsenal of Drupal. It allows you to build custom pages and blocks from the content and content types you have. And not a single line of PHP or SQL has to be written*. (*: if there is a view which fits your needs.)

If you decide to dive into some more details – grab the devel module, it greatly facilitates development for Drupal.

Choose Drupal. It’s strong, flexible (to the point that someone might call it a drawback), versatile, highly extendible, secure, and much more!

EE CMS consists of “modules”. Each module has some admin-side and/or visitor-side functionality, and adds some more template tags, available for templating.

I built a site using EE – http://j-school.kiev.ua/ (it’s in Ukrainian, but has several static pages in English). The site has a main blog, and approximately eight topical sub-blogs. Everything is driven by quite a limited number of custom templates – which are often just “include”-d with different parameters.

As a summary: EE is good for “unusual designs”, as it’s templating is both strong and flexible. However, as a programmer, I find EE “rough around the edges”, and not always consistent. It’s still being developed – for example, the “Pages” module, which allows to create pages with user-defined URLs/permalinks, was added to the core fairly recently; before that, it existed only as a third-party module, and was quite a pain to use.

Disclaimer: I’m in no way associated with EllisLab, except for being a hired programmer for a purchased EE version.

If you gooogle this problem, you will get loads of forums discussing topics like ‘Mambo vs Drupal’, ‘PHP-Nuke vs PostNuke’ etc. But, to be sure, this ‘source’ of information is not likely to really help you choose. What you need is a good in-depth overview of the systems.

And I found one at IBM’s web-site. I strongly recommend reading it if you need to choose a CMS. It’s fresh (July 11, 2006), and just good. Here’s a CMS comparison table from that address (copyrights belong to respective owners):

If you’d like to, you can also read Part 2, or the whole series of articles on IBM’s web-service design process, titled “Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site”. In the series, there are also articles describing the use of Eclipse, Apache, PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin for the collaborative web-site creation.

Update: for some reason :), IBM had taken down parts 1 and 2; now only parts three and four are available.