This is an honest question: if it's mostly a bunch of pages, wouldn't setting up a baseline Ruby on Rails (or similar) site, or using a Ruby on Rails CMS (Locomotive, etc.) be more cost-effective and faster? At worst, you spend a day setting up the basic system that you can then just copy for every new project.

I've long used Drupal, building sites ranging from full-blown content providers to the kinds of sites you speak of, but I still find that setting things up, even when 'copying', and clicking around the interface, and so on, take more time than just copying a base rails app and changing some lines of config and code, or branching an existing project at a point where it has most/all the features I need.

I might still use Drupal, and I've invested considerable amount of time in understanding it, so I'd really like to know the best reasons why I still would.

No its not. my last website had the following features:

multiple content types, backed by private/public file system hosted on s3, UI to configure fields and directories (got all that setup within a few minutes) out of the box SE-Friendly urls with a UI to bulk manage the content (few minutes to install and configure pathauto) Rich text editing using ck4, with a great UI to configure and excellent HTML purifier library to filter text. (few minutes to configure and install wysiwyg, ckeditor, and htmlpurifier) Excellent account management / user profiles / roles/premissions out of the box Excellent Categorization system, out of the box, with configurable widgets on the front/backend revision control out of the box comments out of the box, add spam protection/flood control in minutes Custom views with configurable pagers and designs Cool image management out of the box Caching with memcache, apc, and boost , takes less than 2 min to enable unlike wordpress Drupal is very portable, I personally add the db dump to the files and push them to the server then import the db as needed. everything just works perfectly, move your website to a subdir, or change the hostname, it will still work no need to do anything.

I can go on and on describing many of the excellent modules that you can get using just drush dl <module>, but I think I'd better write a full blog post about it instead. Hopefully will do that in a couple of days.

Heh, I actually forgot about much of that. Plus, I was under the impression you meant really simple bare-bones sites with only a bunch of pages.

I definitely see why Drupal would be beneficial in this situation though.

(P.S.: I'd love to somehow know when you've written this blog post!)

Thing is that most clients want PHP because it runs on everything. They can take their entire site, package up the code + database and move it pretty much anywhere.

good point. I do run into this issue at times, just haven't had a need to start from scratch with clients in a year. I either support existing wordpress/drupal installs, or work with existing rails apps.

that is actually one good point, I find deploying PHP systems a lot easier than python ones (ex Django)

no need to write any services/complex deployment scripts, just push the files and your website is updated ..

We host client websites, however sometimes a client may want to take their website and go elsewhere, so it's easier for them to not worry about where their site can run as pretty much any admin can get PHP working.

Sure I would love to expand work into other languages, but for the short term it's PHP (symfony2/drupal) for us. :-(

Well, Drupal is great for one thing - job security! It's so convoluted and complex, that good programmers who know it well are a rarity and can charge a good premium. But hey, the white house site uses it, so it must be good, right? Right?

Drupal 7 is my favourite PHP CMS to build small client websites with. It's fast and the content types are easy to fit to their requirements. Anything bigger than that makes me cry inside.