Jeffrey Veen says what I have been experiencing for years now: Open Source CMS systems are built by geeks for geeks, and in a lot of cases very hard to use, even for the more experienced developer.
With every new system you’re forced to learn yet another local vocabulary, another admin flavour, install methodology that mostly are not as easy as promised. You are forced to use sometimes lousy built page templates, because learning the templating might take weeks… you never know. The promise is always there, but reality is that most systems don’t do what you want and are hard to customize.
A very nice and constructive rant from Jeffrey
Open source Content Management Systems – An Argumentative approach – What can you do with OSCMS? Explanations and eveluations of 7 Open Source CMS systems.
Michael Angeles replies to Veen’s article: Do open source content management systems suck?
Some time ago though, I decided to concentrate on three systems: WordPress for blogs, Mambo for small to mediumsized sites and Drupal for sites with complex informations requirements and growing potential. I’ll write some more on these systems in the future.
Ah, yet another good reply: Content, Content, who’s got the content? by Theodicius. Criticises Mambo in a friendly and constructive way.