Subtle distinctive features of available CMSes

Question

I know this question would have run across in the minds a lot of people till now, but let me rephrase it according to my doubts.
Amongst some of the more popularly known CMS, what are some of the most distinctive features that make you use a particular one?

Factors that you can consider are

1. Flexibility (The degrees of websites that can be made Out of the Box)
2. Ease of Use and Reliability (Wordpress can perhaps win here. You get the cue?)
3. Extensibility (Availability of plugins and addons - much like Joomla's playground here)
4. Extensibility ease (How easy is the API to learn. SilverStripe probably sucks at this with its not so learner friendly framework. (e.g jQuery scores high here although not a CMS :D)
5. Code Quality (can get a little subjective here)
6. Support and documentation (easy to learn and develop along)
7. Any other rather distinctive feature!

Please be descriptive as this will help me choose a particular CMS for my website!
The Objectives of my Site:

1. Something like in.com ( like a site having pretty much everything )
2. Mainly needed for my Institute and its related events (dynamic user content generation and Delivery)

Answer 1

Complexity

Joomla has 4,500 files in it. WordPress has only 700. The user interface is correspondingly more daunting in Joomla.

Having said that, the one time I did a Joomla site it was fairly easy to make it look like a specific design. Just be aware of what you are getting into.

Answer 2

There are no distinctive features. It's all in how it's all coming together.

Answer 3

Definitely Extensibility ease. A CMS / framework must not take ages to learn how to use it.

Answer 4

From my experience with Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal:

1. It seems that you need a lot of flexibility for this kind of site. I think Drupal wins hands down here with Views/CCK (AFAIK Joomla and Wordpress only support it on a low database-access level)

2. Worpress has an excellent admin interface, I agree. I think it's the winner here - although I haven't seen how it scales to larger sites.

3. All three have a lot of plugins. The only thing I can say here that Joomla's plugin ecosystem kinda annoyed me, because most of the good (or even acceptable) ones cost money, and many free ones have that fishy-'90s-freeware feel to them. Aside from that - it's a draw.

4. Drupal has a very flexible, and in my opinion, relatively elegant API (even though it's not OOP). However, it's pretty big, so it's not 100% trivial to learn.

   Wordpress has a pretty small API, so I guess it's... easy? But kinda lacking.

   Joomla has a new (from the time I've used it) OOP framework, that I haven't used - but it looks like it's as complex as drupal but doesn't (?) have some nice features like Drupal's fine-grained templating and template inheritance or an easy way to change plugin/core cms forms/html without changing the actual plugins/core cms files.

   The winner for me - Drupal. Sub-themes, theme functions, form_alter... etc.

5. When it comes to quality of code - in the main package, all three seem pretty solid.

6. The documentation for Joomla and Drupal is lacking IMHO. It's all over the place, and most of the time you'll probably use their code browsers to figure out the important things. Wordpress has an advantage of having a small enough API to fit in a couple of pages (that are pretty easy to use to boot).

7. As I said earlier - Drupal's main advantage is CCK/Views and a flexible API. With those, you're not as limited to specific plugins' functionality as you are in other CMSes.

As you can clearly see, my current favorite is Drupal, and it seems to be a very common opinion on Stack Overflow.

But!

In my opinion, if the site is sufficiently big/complex, and the site you've linked to certainly is, it's better to go with some nice framework (Django, RoR, or if you're only know PHP - Kohana or something) instead of a CMS.

At some point, trying to make the CMS do what you want, becomes more of a bother than writing it "from scratch" (in quotes because good web frameworks does a lot of the work for you).

Just thinking about making in.com's front page in one of those CMSes makes my brain hurt.