11 July 2006 and the IBM Internet Technology Group team released its evaluation of various CMS systems.

The team operates a closed community based website and evaluated various open source CMS packages including Drupal, Mambo, Ruby On Rails, Typo3 and some more blog-centric engines such as Movable Type, WordPress and TextPattern.

Their aim was to find the solution that would make things easiest for themselves and for others adopting their solution. Criteria included the ability to restrict access by persona, robust user and session management and an extensibly, pluggable infrastructure. Scalability and ease of adjusting the way content is displayed were also important factors considered, as was ability to utilise best practice xHTML, css and accessible design.

The decision?

We did have to invest some time to learn the Drupal way, and the framework just seemed to make sense. We also felt that Drupal provided the right combination of framework and flexibility to break out of the framework when needed to get the job done. With all things considered, we decided to use Drupal.

 

Read: Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site - Tools and techniques for getting relatively complicated Web sites up and running quickly