Save the headaches, use Craft CMS
What I love about creating websites is rapid progress in project development. That's why I always value tools that speed up my workflow.
Recently I faced the problem to pick a CMS for a project. I had few alternatives, but after days of research, two candidates were standing on the podium: Expression Engine and Craft CMS.
I deliberately didn't read any documentation how to set up a basic site, just the essentials, what are the first 1-2 steps for installation. Both candidate were quite easy to install.
"Oh gosh, I'm not really further with my decision". Craft setup screen was a bit more pretty, but that shouldn't be an evaluation criteria. What should be then? Let's figure out how it works on my own.
Expression Engine came almost "empty", which means that you have a blank universe and you have fill it in with atoms and molecules. Craft on the other hand has a very basic structure that you can get rid of easily, but it holds your hand while taking the first steps. This is what I was looking for, I was able to add custom property to an article and display that value in the front-end code in 5 minutes. With a bit more reading I found that common cases are well documented too.
This was it, decision made, Craft it is. I also researched the size of the developer community, supply of plugins and available resources how to do more advanced things. I was still on board.
I did my last 4 projects in it and I couldn't be more happier with it. It reduces my workload by 80% that I don't have to think about how to implement backend stuff to manage content. Previously I used my homemade code and admin panel generator, but Craft saves even more time. I'll keep it for "special projects".
The Craft team was really great at identifying what the most common use cases are for an average CMS project and made that part seamless. This covers about 80% of the projects out there (gut feeling based on years of experience).
Would I use it for all projects in the future? Of course not, it's just a tool not the Holy Grail, but for most CMS projects it's a great candidate.
I created a small repository on GitHub to help others add some defaults for a new project that I always do anyways:
https://github.com/tiborsaas/craft-starter
See my latest works at: http://tibor.szasz.hu