I looked at several CMS-type applications before settling on WordPress for this blog.
We have other projects using Plone, but that one was crossed off the list pretty early because it requires a separate process to run Zope. That doesn’t really fit in the UA web server environment, nor would it work for my personal blog.
Next up was Typo3, which I still really like. It’s extremely flexible, very configurable, and gives an editor a lot of control over content. I like its template system (I used TemplaVoila) and the fact that pages can be built up from multiple content blocks, each which has separate version control. You can also easily reuse blocks in multiple pages. The major downside is it’s pretty complex to get going, especially if you don’t want the default look; TypoScript is very flexible and powerful, requiring a lot of experimentation. Less of a factor to me but still an issue is there’s a big rewrite underway which will mean changing extensions. For what it’s worth, when it’s released, 5.0 looks like it will be even better than 4.x.
I then started looking at Drupal, which seems to have a lot of momentum right now. It works well on the UA web servers, but for some reason I had a bit of trouble getting my mind around how things went together. I’m guessing it was the fact that I had spent so much time with Typo3, as well as helping people with Plone. Overall, I still liked Typo3 better.
That brings us up to WordPress. While it seems to be focused on blogging, it has enough CMS features to keep me happy. It does page hierarchy better out-of-the-box than Drupal, which I wanted for my personal site. The themes seem very simple to work on, even though I’m starting out with downloaded themes (although I’ve made some small tweaks). Workflow is pretty good, and I like how easy it was to integrate external authentication (either Pubcookie or OpenID).
