Choosing a CMS can be difficult, here i'll take you through the basics and hopefully help you decide which is best for you.
I've always been a fan of wordpress. Starting with no experience of PHP and just some basic HTML and CSS skills, wordpress enabled me to create a dynamic site very quickly!
First off, there's two versions of wordpress. Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org
.com is a free online blogging tool, hosted by wordpress.com, you can quickly and easily sign up and have a basic site running in minutes. The downsides are the limitations they put on you. You can only load themes and plug-ins that are part of their approved directory, you have no ftp access, so can't create your own custom theme and the default url you will be given will be username.wordpress.com. The Url isn't a huge problem as you can easily just buy a domain name and point it at username.wordpress.com, but just looks a little less professional.
So the second option here is Wordpress.org. With .org you host the wordpress installation yourself, this gives you endless control. You can now load whatever themes you can find or fairly easily create your own (i'll post links at the end on how to do this) and the same goes with plugins! This is ideal for blogs, has a really nice looking user interface and is very easy to use. It also goes quite deep and with some PHP knowledge you can start dreaming up how you'd like your site to perform and build your own solutions.
Wordpress.org is primarily known as blogging software, but is beginning to be recognised as a serious CMS (content management system) with web developers using it for much bigger projects. For eg. theLostnFound use it to power their site, providing them with a blogging platform, video podcasts and users can sign in and post the their forum. So for small sites i'd happily recommend Wordpress.org providing you don't want users to have their own content on the site.
Right so where does Drupal fit in? Drupal is a beast of a CMS. Allowing you to do pretty much anything you can imagine. The only problem is your going to have to work out how. It has a steep learning curve, but if your willing to put in the hard work you can begin to harness the power Drupal has to offer. First major difference is the interface. Drupal will actually use your websites theme as an admin user interface and with tonnes of admin options it's easy to get lost in their menus at first.
After working with Drupal for 8 weeks now, i love it and when building a community website, would recommend it every-time. It worth learning how to use it, as it's goin to be around for a long time and once learnt can be a very useful tool. Some of the benefits of Drupal are users can have their own profile pages, upload sections for photos/files, and even their own blog page within your site. Drupal will scale up to meet whatever demands you throw at it, so if you see your project growing, it's probably goin to be best to put in the extra work at the beginning and learn Drupal.
The only downside with Drupal is it's complicated! If your not a web developer and don't understand PHP then stick with wordpress. With drupal even the most simple tasks aren't straight forward. For eg. you'll have to install three plugins to get a workin WYSIWYG editor that you can upload images into your posts, where as with wordpress this is provided straight away as standard.
Summary
So as a quick review...
Wordpress.com: startup time 30mins - quick easy online blog, up and running in minutes
Wordpress.org: startup time few days - an excellent blogging platform and suitable for small scale websites with limited membership options for users signing up
Drupal: startup time few weeks - a complex Content Management System capable of creating huge sites with endless functionality.
links
- Create your own Wordpress theme
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