In 2005 or so, I stopped creating websites from scratch in favor of using a Content Management System (CMS). The benefit was clear: using well vetted code to avoid reinventing the wheel, and being able to focus on design, content and custom functionality. A CMS also allows easy updates to core code as well as design or content changes.  Modules or plugins allow adding new functions easily, and creating new plugins made code reuse easy.

In my first round of research, the Drupal CMS came out on top, and I developed several sites starting from version 4 up to version 7. About that time, I had customers specifically requesting WordPress, so I began creating sites with that as well. About the same time, there was chatter about the fact that Drupal 8 was going to be more enterprise-centric with a difficult upgrade path from 7. While this will obviously fill a need, most of my customers are small businesses that are seeking to avoid complexity and cost.  One response to the difficulties presented by Drupal 8 was to fork the Drupal 7 code into Backdrop, a CMS that preserves the ease of Drupal 7, while implementing some of the newer features found in Drupal 8.

There has long been a perception that WordPress is simple, but not terribly flexible, and is best for blogs, while Drupal and the like is better for full featured sites.  This was certainly true early on, and is still true for large enterprise sites, but with the incredible market share that WordPress has, it has slowly gained a lot of advanced features, at least through plugins, if not the core code itself.

WordPress also has a powerful range of theme options from many existing themes to frameworks for rapid development to minimal themes allowing customization without complete creation from scratch.

As a result of these developments, I have made WordPress my default CMS for my small business customers, for websites or landing pages. WordPress will still have some limitations, so I plan to keep my eye on the Drupal ecosystem, especially on Backdrop for when extra features are needed.  Realistically, my knowledge of LAMP, especially PHP and CSS allows me to be up to speed on any CMS quickly, but my approach to rapid deployment sites makes it desirable to automate installs with scripts and be able to develop custom themes quickly.  I have also done a site for a photographer using Koken.

If you want to drill down into more detail, the CMS Matrix site, allows you to compare features of over 1200 CMSes!