Drupal and Plone

I've just spent some time catching up on the rest of this week's lesson content and perusing through Drupal and Plone. My initial impressions of these sites compared to Joomla! is that Plone seems to have (for me, at least) the most intuitive layout. The site seemed to know where my thoughts were going in terms of the most prominently displayed links, and offered up easily accessible case studies and lists of hosting providers--I haven't decided yet if I'm going with a hosting provider or setting up one of our old boxes in the closet to do it myself. Probably the later because I tend to be a control freak.

I think Joomla! has the "friendliest" language in that it approaches the subject of CMS from a beginner's standpoint in the pages and documentation I found. Drupal's three-column layout was a little overwhelming at first, and it seemed that the menus kind of jumped around a little as I paged through and I got a little lost--however, Drupal also offered some readily available forums for the contributors which openly discussed problems and fixes.

I'm going to need to do a little more research before I pick one, I think, because I'm really looking for a CMS that would allow me more access to play with the "guts" (the back-end programming language). Ultimately, I think I'm going to spend some time looking through the case studies more to see how the final sites turned out. Aesthetics are important, and good layout potential is currently topping the list of "needs" for my friends' blog.