I've finally got the Offspin site onto a content management system (CMS).

I've had several attempts at this over the years, but not found a system I was comfortable with. I've finally settled on Drupal. Main reasons were:

• It doesn't use exotic technology (just Apache and PHP);
• It's easy to get friendly URLs;
• The themes are clean and mostly free.

Before this I'd looked at OpenCms and Joomla. OpenCms was one I'd used before to provide client documentation, but it requires Tomcat. That in itself isn't a problem, but it is near-impossible to remove the ugly URLs which result. Also, the documentation for OpenCms is pitiful, even by the crap standards one expects from Open Source software.

Joomla looked promising, but I found the templates and layouts too fussy, and the template system seems to be a means for designers to charge you for layouts, none of which do quite what you want. It is easier to create your own template with Joomla (you don't have to mix JSP, Java and XML as with OpenCms) and the process is documented (unlike OpenCms where the documentation appears to be spread about the web as a series of unconfirmed rumours). However, the URLs are still ugly and I never got the "friendly URL" feature to work.

For some reason I'd missed Drupal in my initial trawl for usable CMSs, and I only found it via a link on the Joomla home page. The themes are simple: they don't intrude on what you are trying to do or force you into other people's design choices, and the URL rewriting worked out-of-the box.