I was reading reviews on Drupal vs Wordpress vs Joomla when I was deciding on which solution would be better suited for iwaant.com . I started with Wordpress since it is most popular platform used by leading professional bloggers. I bought a hosting package from GoDaddy and started using Wordpress. I was very happy with variety of free themes being available and ease of installation of plugins with plugins like All in one SEO, related posts etc. More important everything happens automatically with press of a button.

The latest posts appears on the frontpage of the blog and the contents were managed using tags and categories. Things were going fine and then I realised - the menu options did not have the drop-down functions. As I wanted to developed concepts on my website, more questions arose.

• If I write on varied topics, how do I organise the contents in relevant manner. My Management Accountant Blog is popular but it is difficult to organise information in a flexible manner.
• Professional blogger have come up with e-books and turned it into revenue earner. How would I organise an e-book on wordpress.
• Website like Mashable.com has multiple writers. Antonio Lupetti of woorkup.com moved from blogger to Wordpress. Now he had multiple writers too.
  
• How do I engage more readers on iwaant without making them writers or commentators - without actively involved in moderation. My experience on CMA India Portal in dealing with users made me think, it would be a good idea to have a forum later. Problogger.net now has Problogger.com for a forum.
• Will wordpress have collaborative tool like Wiki in future.

So questions like these made me think to search for a better solution for www.iwaant.com

What did I do to arrive at my decision

1. Read Online reviews : I searched on google with search words Wordpressvs Joomlavs Drupal. Which CMS you should choose - Tim Stiffler-Dean has explained pro and cons of each solution. Compass Design gives a matrix of costs suggesting Joomla as a economical option and CMSwire on favorable developer experience on Joomla. Which one is right - Alledia gives comparison between Drupal and Joomla and gives favourable review on Drupal.  There was view on many forums that Drupal is very techie and learning curve is steeper than Joomla.
2. Free Hosting sites: Initially I created a sandbox on free site DrupalCafe to learn Drupal and understand the designing the site. I found it extremely difficult to relate Site building with Site Configuration, menus with content management. I spent lot of time and efforts to know about user friendly url without a success. At that point of time, I came to a conclusion - Drupal is for hardcore programmers and not for me. I moved on. I registered on free site freejoomlas.com and tested my design and concepts. Joomla is pretty easy to learn and design. Free templates are available and there are lot of extentions available. So opted for Joomla.
3. Configured Joomla on GoDaddy.com: I installed Joomla on my Wordpress hosting account and started building iwaant.com. As I was adding various topics, I was not finding Joomla flexible. E.g. You write on a Digital Camera with 3X Optical zoom and 12 Mega Pixel. There is no easy way to use two categories for the topic. This limits the search options both the users and web designer. Probably the users will not find website friendly and my choose not to visit it again. Moreover I found, my website was little bit slow to load and this experience was not encouraging. So I had to go back to my drawing board.
4. Revisited Drupalcafe: Since it was difficult to understand drupal documentation, I visited some of their showcase websites to understand their design and then related the concepts and configuration of drupal. I did not mind url path with the naming convention node 5, node 6 etc till one day I accidentally entered few words in the create content - url path settings and published it. It was a eureka moment for me as I was able to see a user friendly url. Then I was able to relate Navigation - > Menu - Blog / Page / Story -> url on Drupal. The site is very quick to load and there are lot of modules available to use.
5. Installed Drupal on GoDaddy.com: I removed Joomla application on my Godaddy account and installed Drupal. When I learnt the finer points of Drupal, it now looks to be a very powerful and user friendly content management system. Unlike Wordpress or Joomla, you have to use FTP to install modules but it has all the features to make it collaborative. It should be able to handle large number of users as my website iwaant.com grows.

 I chose drupal over others for following reasons

1. It allows unlimited category levels, tagging and categorization. You can also create multiple types of content, each with different features.
2. The website is quick to load and it is SEO friendly. (Contents published on Blogger is quick on search engine results. Drupal site would take time. Now I am not that bothered about SEO, as I believe content would bring the users back).
3. Drupal has the features for blog, pages, story which combines Wordpress and Joomla together.
4. Drupal meets the needs of different types of web sites from community to news portals, from corporate sites to educational institutions, from media sites to international sites. And I believe when iwaant.com grows, we are fully geared to cater to the needs of the users without huge investment.
5. Just like Wordpress, Drupal has a face and founder Dries Buytaert who is excited on his creation - Drupal. His open source baby which he and other developers made it.