When Building a CMS: Drupal, Joomla!, or Plone?

Of those three, I’d choose Drupal. I haven’t tried any of them in a while, but Drupal was the easiest to set up, had the most straightforward admin, and had lots of plugins. Plone had a lot of cool features, but was incredibly slow.

Why have you narrowed it down to these three? What are your needs? There are hundreds of CMS’s out there.

I recommend wordpress. It can be used for any kind of website, not just blogs. And it handles very well.

I am on board with @phoenyx‘s assessment, if choosing from these 3 then I would throw my hat in the ring with Drupal.

@phoenyx from my research they seem to be the most well known and used of the open source (free) CMS’s. My primary purpose is building an Intranet for my company, but I am also interested in other uses, and was hoping to get some developer experiences with the different products. I’ve played with Plone a little, and I think it would do a good job. I just don’t want to go too far down the road if there is a better tool out there.

Are there others that you would recommend? (also @drClaw )

Thanks @ninjacolin I haven’t really considered Wordpress, but it might be worth a second look.

Wordpress.org is probably, if not the most widely used open source CMS, and as @ninjacolin said is can be used for just about any website, not just blogs.

I recommend Wordpress.

If you are looking for an intranet then I’d definitely look at Plone. Plone works great out of the box as a company intranet. Plone 3.3.3 was just released and you can get the either the binary or unified (source) installers from plone.org for your platform. It is probably the simplest of the 3 you’ve mentioned to setup (just download and run the installer and its done).

We released a theme for plone that we use on our intranet: http://plone.org/products/plonetheme.netsightintranet

If you want to see how far you can go with Plone as an intranet, take a look at a presentation I gave recently at the IMS expo in London last month:
http://www.slideshare.net/hammertoe/the-flexibility-of-open-source-a-case-study-of-a-large-corporate-intranet

If you are going to be storing a large number of big files on the intranet then you might also want to look at the BLOB support package:
http://plone.org/products/plone.app.blob
This will be a default in Plone 4 which is due out sometime in the next month or so.

-Matt

@hammertoe Thanks for the info and well done on the presentation!