Most people who are looking for a stable low-cost CMS solution stop with either Drupal or Mambo, or they choose one of the nuke-esque portals. While I’m not a wizard with any of them, I’ve tinkered, toyed, ripped open, and experimented with a lot of these types of applications.

For what I do (building applications for others rather than myself or organization), I find Drupal to be ideal where budget is a concern. There’s several reasons for this.

1. It’s open-source which makes it free.
2. It installs in a matter of minutes.
3. It’s well-documented and supported.
4. It’s feature-rich.
5. It’s scalable.
6. It doesn’t make many assumptions about what you’re intensions are (more about this one in a bit)
7. It’s highly configurable. (more about this one in a bit)

What’s most important to me in this list is #6 and #7. Most of these out-of-the-box, turn-key portal solutions assume that you want to build to be a content portal. What if you wanted to weave an e-commerce catalog into your installation? What if you wanted to build other custom modules? Some of these ready-to-go types aren’t great with scaling and flexing to meet your need. Also, when you do the install  it creates a bunch of defaults to help you get by. Although these defaults can help you understand how stuff works, and what shows up where, they’re also a pain in the butt sometimes to get rid of.

Most of these nuke sites are extremely configurable, as long as you’re configuring something that’s already there, or can be added on with some .zip file download. Like I just mentioned, maybe I want a core site to develop around. Maybe I want to use the framework provided by the portal software, but I don’t necessarily want to use the modules pre-developed and packaged with it. Mambo is a strong portal application, and it’s great at what it does, but it can be handcuffing. Nuke sites are a little better, since the “nuke” style of coding is fairly well-known. If you know how to write modules and hooks into the portal, you’ll be ok.

There’s another portal/framework out there called “Magnolia” which is by far the best out there for building custom modules onto. Since I’m not really a proponent of Java/JSP/Servlets, etc… I wouldn’t use it, but I’ve done it for others in the past. Aside from Magnolia, Drupal is about the best there is. Since it’s PHP, it’s easy to understand, modify, or scale. This, coupled with it’s VERY simple look and feel makes building a site core with Drupal extremely effective.

Although there are templates out there, the nicest feature of Drupal is that you can escape from that “portal” look and feel. Almost every one of these types  of portal applications looks like a portal application, and not a unique website. By using Drupal, you can remove the canned look and go for something specatular.