[sdudenhofer]

Have you looked at Drupal? Drupal 8 with a couple modules could handle everything you need(custom content types, discussion boards, blogs, user profiles, etc) It is scalable and easily configurable. www.drupal.org plus the community is a big help.

[userAW]

Thanks very much for your input.

We looked at Drupal 8 a little and spoke to some people in the organization who are using it.

Our concerns are:

1. the need for full-scale developers when working with Drupal. We don't want to the site maintenance to be dependent on hard-core coders long-term, since that requires always hiring programmers rather than lower-level web developers.

2. Drupal upgrades. We've heard that it's very difficult to upgrade between Drupal versions, as many of the plugins/modules don't get upgraded, at least not right away. So you can be left with a Drupal site that can't be upgraded without losing functionality.

Any comments?

[zefman]

For your sanity please do not use Drupal 8! I have recently finished a very large project using Drupal 8 and it nearly killed me.

Without bashing it too much the main issues were severe lack of good documentation, bugs in the core, bugs in contributed modules and poor development workflow.

Funnily enough, as a result of this project I started investigating alternative cms's and from now on will be using Craft.

Initially I was concerned it wouldn't be suitable for a project as complex as the project above, so I spent a day or too recreating some of the more complex parts of that project with Craft and it was a dream!

The developer learning curve with Craft is one of the best I have ever seen with a cms. We now have devs who previously only did frontend using craft in no time.

Nothing but good things to say about it really!

[sdudenhofer]

1. depends on if you need to build custom modules/plugins. Alot of the functionality that you seem to need can be created using already created modules(plus my experience is that if I'm thinking I need to build a module one is already out there.) 2. I've heard they are trying to make this better, but it can be wonky. A lot of times developers will wait 3-4 months to allow modules to catch up to the new version.

Another option may be Backdrop (backdropcms.org). Which is working on maintaining backwards compatibility.

[lightlyused]

Backdrop should only be used if you cannot upgrade, not for new projects.

[lightlyused]

I'll address two. With the new Drupal 8 architecture (symfony2 based), upgrades between major versions will be much easier in the future.

[userAW]

Do you have any exposure to Craft? Just curious. Thanks!

[sdudenhofer]

I personally do not have any experience with Craft.