Drupal 7.14

I've used Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal.
Drupal has been the best option for me so far.
Wordpress - I don't even want to talk about - to me it's not far from Blogger.

The reasons I prefer Drupal are various.
First, hierarchical taxonomies. In contrast to WP and Joomla, you can build as complex trees of categories and subcategories as you like. Drupal 7 is going even further - do a Google search on "Drupal 7 review".

Second, Custom Content Types and Vies allow users to build and display ANYTHING they like in WHATEVER way they like. In Drupal 7 both of them are in the core.

Third, with Drupal, I know that ANYTHING is possible. ANYTHING can be customisable neither be it templating, theming, some other functionality...

Last, native forum, localisation, multi-blogging support.

Regarding performance, steep learning curve, maintenance, scalability, web 2.0, lack of functionalities in the core (that other people mentioned as drawbacks):
Drupal is about choice. No WYSIWYG editor in the core means you have the choice of WHICH editor you want to plug-in. No Image Gallery module in the core means - AGAIN - the same thing. There are hundreds of different ways of achieving things in Drupal. The decision should NOT be Drupal's but yours! Having said that, Drupal 7 brings lots of these modules - such as image, views, taxonomies, cck in the core. Drupal 7 also simplifies administration - if you want to see it for yourselves go to Drupalgardens and have a look.

Performance: Make a Google search on Drupal performance. You will see valid research putting Drupal amongst the fastest CMSs available. So far, I haven't had any problem with speed in my sites.

Maintenance: Yes, horrific so far. BUT Drupal 7 again is geared towards automatic updates so fingers crossed :)

To summarize: Drupal is extremely flexible, powerful and customisable.

However, it is important to note the following. Drupal is ideal ONLY for the user who:
1. Is passionate about technology and solutions and wants to build things "better", "faster", more "flexible"...
2. Enjoys UNDERSTANDING and wants to bring this understanding to his/her clients.
3. Enjoys hard work and diving in technical documentation to make things work THE WAY THEY want.

Drupal is NOT for the faint hearted, the lazy developer OR the every-day person who needs a publishing platform to express daily thoughts.

As ALL things good in life. Drupal too, needs commitment.

Hope this helps a few people

Yes Drupal is easy to use but has a very bad administration interface.

Nice, its great to learn with this CMS

If you want an out-of-the-box solution then look at Acquia Drupal, if you need a scalable high performance version look at Pressflow - these are both configured distributions of Drupal (there are others to suit other needs).

After reading a few pages of these comments I would have to say that much of this is either extreme ignorance or deliberate disinformation. I rather suspect the latter.
The reality is Drupal is a solid content management framework that is infinity extensible and configurable.
If you want an out-of-the-box solution then look at Acquia Drupal, if you need a scalable high performance version look at Pressflow - these are both configured distributions of Drupal (there are others to suit other needs).
As a long term Drupal user/developer I will agree that you need to read the handbook and understand the structure but once you have jumped that style the game is on...

@BigDaddy
I guess you've never been to the White House website.

I read a lot of these comments. Look people, Drupal IS NOT that difficult. I read complaints about the templating system:

C'MON! Are you kidding me? Drupal theming is a piece of cake! A lot of the theming complaints should actually be with your template designer, not Drupal. If you get a commercial, or a very good free theme from like Top Notch Themes, then you'll see how super easy theming is in Drupal.

I recently designed a site for a client in Joomla... and the whole time I was wishing for Drupal theming.

Now let's look at mods: Drupal mods are free. In Joomla, you're gonna pay a crazy high amount for them. And I've yet to see Joomla have anything close to Views, CCK and WebForm. Sure, Joomla has K-2, FlexiContent... but let's be honest, there aren't anywhere near the quality of CCK. And as far as Views: Joomla has nothing like it. But don't get me wrong, I like Joomla (actually use it on one of my personal sites).

Now as far as speed:
Straight out of the box, Drupal is as fast (or faster) than any other CMS. But yeah, when you load it with mods, it does become terribly slow. Hopefully they'll solve this in D7.

No, Drupal isn't for beginners. Yeah, there's a very steep learning curve. But c'mon... if you're looking for something quick and easy then you're not really a web designer. I always recommend newbies stay away from BOTH Drupal and Joomla. Wordpress is for you.

Drupal is safe, stable, flexible, mature and is overall more powerful than any other CMS out there. Stop complaining and take the time to learn it properly... or move on to something easier.

@BigDaddy, everyone has there opinion, but with a comment like that, your the one that sounds amaturish, you obviously have not looked at the many different themes that are available, just like Joomla, if none of the free ones from the Drupal site strike your fancy, then check the theme monster site out (if you don't mind paying for them, but being a Joomla user, you would be paying for modules too).

I am not a fan of Drupal. The sites look very amaturish... Joomla is better when it comes to a better looking site. I am disappointed that my client wants Drupal. Wow.... Not good.

Drupal is good for beginners. A lot a templates, a lot of modules, easy to use.
But for developpers that build site for customers it is not the best CMS.
Template system is not flexible. You spend hours on hacking with no chance to meet your customer requirements.
Modules are numerous but not well maintained. It has happened to us that after having installed various modules for one of our customer, we had to update the site. For a specific module, it was then impossible to have an update and we had to code the full module again. A real shame and a real waste of time.

What we do not understand with Drupal is why they put so many feature under modules (not in core). In many other CMS the same feature are in core (text editor, image, cache, tempalte, and may other ones).

Finally, Drupal has a very bad cache system that leads to very bad performance. Just install a few modules and you will see the site performance slow down like crazy.

Switched from Joomla to Drupal to build an complex Website that wouldn't be possible with Joomla at all.

Well, Drupal is not easy to begin with. It's getting sometimes very frustrating. But Drupal is worth the trouble in my opinion.

Sometimes I wonder if there is any good free CMS out there. I've tried a lot of them, especially the popular ones. Drupal still serves me best.

Drupal... a lot of bloated stuff, but nothing really professional.
Redondant features, and slow, very slow.
One of the slowest CMS here around.

You always will fing people around claiming that Drupal is fast as the light. Let's dig a bit: if you use only the core, then Drupal is reasonably fast. If you install 10+ modules, Drupal is dealy slow.
The issue is, that you have to install modules, because the core is naked.
Big mess really.

If you need to put as much money as Intel, Robbie, or the US government to make Drupal working... than forget it.

A CMS has to be a breeze.
Obviously Drupal has some big drawbacks.

For all people who are afraid of performance:

http://www.robbiewilliams.com/
http://www.commerce.gov/
http://appdeveloper.intel.com/en-us/
http://www.een.be/

I think if Intel, Robbie, and the US government are happy with performance and flexibility it will be fast enough for most developers out here.

A few years ago, being faced with the Joomla limits I reviewed many CMS and chose Drupal.
Drupal has a clean code, very-well documented, has many features, an enormous amount of modules, a powerful community (one knows how important this is when choosing a CMS), a lot of information on the site.

But what made the decision was that Drupal is 'born' SEO. It is a delicious piece of code for search engine.
Furthermore, Drupal is known to be lightweight, a few MB only. This is only a thumb rule, but code weight has its meaning too.
A last, Drupal has some exceptional modules: Ubercart (ecommerce), Views, Taxonomy, CCK.
All these pluses did that I could accept an administration interface that is under average and the fact that you need to install many modules before one can actually have a decent working site.

I did some nice blogs and little sites with Drupal. But when I wanted to do big stuff, that is where the many pluses of Drupal became its worst enemies.

The code is light? Yes, but because the core has very few features. If you want a decent site, then you have to install at least 20-30 modules. Note that these modules are only standard feature in other CMS.

For example if you want full SEO one has to install following modules: metatag, pathauto, path, token, global redirect, xml sitemap and enable clean URL. That's 6 modules. For Multilingual feature you need to install 8 modules or more if you want also localization.

Many other CMS have SEO or multilingual feature integrated in core.
Then, what does it means that Drupal is light when you need to install 2, 3, 4, 5 plus modules for each feature?
Drupal is light only because most of its features are modules (non core) whereas they are in core in other CMS.

You want to add a field on a post? Please, install first a bunch of modules (CCK for instance). You want to add pictures, same thing, first install some modules.

I still could accept this additional work because, as said, Drupal has some great pluses.
But it has been a mistake.

The core is a strictly followed piece of code. But this is not the case of most of the modules. Their development is anarchical and often goes nowhere.
Furthermore, often they do not respect the core standards and therefore lead to quite a few code overlap and non-coherence. This is a real issue, as you must install many modules to build a normal site.

For example if you have used the image module in Drupal 5.x and you have upgraded to Drupal 6.x (Drupal 6.x is out since late 2007), well you won't have a stable release for the image module under Drupal 6.x. It is still under development!
Do you think you need pictures on your site? Well, be warned.

This is not a lonely case. Many modules are still not stable today despite the fact that the new version is out since a long time.
So we read here and there that Drupal 7.x will come very soon. Many developers get nervous and would rather the 6.x release to be entirely stable (module included).

Furthermore, the module issue is exacerbated by the fact that module development is not consistent.

Take the image gallery module (this one also has no stable version for Drupal 6.x) it comes in competition with the acidfree module (another image gallery module), with the Gallery module (a bridge to Menalto), the imagefield gallery, etc.
All of them give a share of what you need, but none of them gives really all what you need.

The anarchical way of developing modules leads to a full lack of control over the code quality and the module features. More importantly, you never can be sure whether the module will be upgraded to the next release.
This shows clearly the limits of having the standard feature developed in modules.
This shows also the negative side of having so many modules. Many modules only serve when developed under a coherent purpose.

The next problem starts when you have to update all your modules. A nightmare. Imagine updates that need to be done every 1-2 month or so on a multitude of modules. Horrible maintenance. Especially if you have sites installed on different servers (hosting depends often on clients).
On top of that updates are not always working properly (remember the modules do rarely follow the core standards regarding development).
In short you loose a lot of time for a lot of frustration.
On top of that, if you have done the mistake to upgrade to Drupal 6.x you inevitably faced with modules that did not move from 5.x to 6.x.

The other bad side is the more you add Modules in drupal, the slower the site becomes. It is almost mathematic. Drupal is fast when it has only a few modules installed, but it is dramatically slow when you want a normal featured site.

OK, you can always tweak and optimize here and there (and also install additional modules for caching). And out there you will find Drupal sites running at normal speed. But if one puts identical optimization efforts with another CMS he would have the impression to pilot a racing car weight ahead of what Drupal could do.
Warning: if you plan to use Drupal on a shared hosting, simply forget it.

Compared to ModX or Expression Engine, Drupal is here the big looser.
As users tend to leave site that are slow, this is a real issue.
If you plan a community site or a high traffic site, Drupal is definitively not a good choice.

Therefore I would say that the many modules of Drupal are also its biggest drawback: Drupal is nothing without many installed modules, Drupal is a nightmare when many modules are installed.

On top of SEO and speed, the other thing that is critical to developers is: template.
Here I won't be long as many other comments already point out this feature.
Drupal is definitively 10 years behind CMS like Silverstripe, Typolight, ModX, CMSmadesimple, Expression Engine, etc: Drupal has no freedom, design is forced, no flexibility.

Have a look at the Drupal themes on the Drupal site: they are not nice looking and you can not propose them to a customer.
You want to use a free or even to buy one (xhtml/css)? It is wasted time and money as the template system of Drupal won't allow you to use it. Or you will need to spend so much time for tweaking that the bill on the customer side will skyrocket.
Look at the Drupal site and you will have an idea of what I mean with not good looking design.

Even if Drupal would decide to change its temple system, it would lead to such a lot of work that it is not foreseeable before many years.

To conclude I would say that Drupal has been a top technology when facing the well-known Mambo / Joomla, but it has missed the quantum leap initiated by other CMS.