Over the past couple of years I've done a number of Joomla! and Drupal deployments and just finished my first commercial WordPress deployment for electronic payment specialists subLyme Payments.  All three are more than adequate for most web sites.  But as we all know the devil is in the details.  Choose the right CMS and you're a web rock star.  Get it wrong and you're in Purgatory ... on the way to getting your guru badge for 1000 posts in the support forum.  Cool geek cred, but your site still sucks.

 Inspired by Barrie North's post "How to Choose Between Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress", here's my contribution to the great CMS debate: "The CMS Chooser".

In a nutshell:

• Drupal is superior software and can be configured to do just about anything you can imagine without any code customization. The road to success is long and winding.  Drupal community is passionate about Drupal being great software.
  
• Joomla! is easy to install, can look really good, but it's just a pain in the ass to learn.  A CMS without pages is just a bad idea.  Joomla! community is fragmented and keeps update cycle short to guarantee steady stream of consulting income. 
• WordPress ... easy to install, easy to use, easy to add features. WordPress just rocks. WordPress community is huge because you don't have to be a web geek to use WP.

WordPress wins by a landslide in the Twitter popularity contest