What throws a spanner in the mix is when the client wants multiple user access rights, methods of multiple signoffs of content (author>editor>publisher etc.).

Throw in scheduled publishing, a CRM system and integration of the shopping cart system into the client’s Pastel setup and things are looking considerably more extensive.

One main point I was trying to make in my post was that you can find a CMS for any website, but none are necessarily the best for every need.

In that way we get a nice mix of versatility and built in functionality without needing to bend the design or functionality of the site to suit the CMS or make the CMS do horrible things to support the site design.

I would say the ultimate CMS is probably not one which tries to manage absolutely every aspect of your site, but rather one which provides a solid base layer of functionality and gets out of your way to allow for the more bespoke things you want to develop.

Susan, I fully agree that things can be very clunky and not very well integrated when using some of the open source systems. I do however maintain, that with the right choice of CMS, and more importantly, the right choice of person/company to set it all up can end in some favourable results.

For very demanding needs, I think something like Realm Platform is ideal albeit expensive.

Tony, I am a big fan of Joomla. I attended Joomla day last year and wear the shirt regularly (geek hey?). I didn’t mean anything about the Joomla crowd being gung-ho, but rather just picked them as an example… could be Drupal, or Wordpress.

To both of you though, I feel that while Joomla is great and writing your own CMS is an option (a very demanding option); just doing your homework, researching the options (not only the free ones) is your best plan of action.

I would say that Joomla is probably the least represented gung-ho users; I would say your typical Drupal or even WordPress user will scream much louder than the average Joomla user…. Or it could just be the people I hang around.

All three are great CMSs and there are others but those are the three big ones… Each to his own, right?!

While many of the popular OSS CMS’s you mention are “customizable”, the outcome (even if you following the “best practices”, etc.) are more often than not clunky and not at all elegant on a software maintainability perspective. Sometimes you really just need to write your own custom CMS for your application if it needs a lot of custom work. That then leads us on to the discussion of “the world’s best web framework”, but the answer to that is also very similar to your answer on CMSes!:)