Drupal - came with over 3,000 files and is a nightmare.

I had to jump into Drupal a year and a half ago with only html and basic css knowledge and it was a horrible experience. I then had to switch to Joomla which wasn't pleasant either before I finally switched to CMS Made Simple.

WP is the smartest choice out of them all, although not the most intuitive tool out there, it's definitely one of the best. Best of luck!

Justin Witz Thanks. I've gone back to him and explained that it's really not a good move to go with Drupal, found a WordPress theme that is good and started tweaking the free version that we can upgrade to the paid version.

I'm of the opinion it's alright to have problems as long as you can propose a solution at the same time.

It's great looking at WordPress having learnt CSS, HTML and PHP. It suddenly looks logical and powerful. Everything can be changed. :)

I feel your pain Matthew Campbell, I had to work with Drupal in one of my jobs and it was a nightmare - and my HTML/CSS is spot-on - personally, I feel you have to have a good understanding of Javascript and PHP / backend to really do things 'easily' with Drupal.

I would have said the same thing - move to Wordpress lol. Bit more user-friendly for clients :-)

Drupal is possibly one of the best CMS's I've ever used. The reason why everyone hates it? It's extremely difficult and foreign. Becoming good at drupal can easily land you a very good paying job. It's not just something to pick up for one time use. I use wordpress for most of my basic clients web pages and blogs. For a medium to large business with the need of a full fledged website, Drupal is my go to. Go look at the list of websites made. The biggest thing people don't understand about Drupal is that your "clients" cannot manage them. You need to manage them, or they need to find someone that can manage drupal websites.

Thanks Caroline Murphy and Ernest Grzybowski Invaluable advice there Ernest. Definite big no no for a site the client wants to manage. I'll explain this to them and keep it in mind for future.

I think a lot of my woes come from the fact the theme I'm looking at is 5 years old and while its had features added, it hasn't actually been updated.

My biggest issue is it uses php5.2. A lot of web hosts are forcing 5.4.7 from what I see. I don't want to have to go through 3,300 files trying to sort the thousands of errors been caused by it or start trying to add hacks and patches to make it work.

I think I'll look at a stock install of Drupal in more detail. I had a brief look and thought it looked good but I think it's more the theme that's the issue.

Matthew Campbell no problem. Drupal is just another rabbit hole to fall into. Drupal 7 is awesome and I hope you get to enjoy all the hard work that people have put in to make it that amazing. Keep coding!

Ernest Grzybowski I'm hoping to have this project wrapped up in a day or two. It's only css styling that needs reworking so nothing major.

I will definitely sit down for a day and look into Drupal with a current up to date theme or just a basic Drupal7 framework.

As I mentioned, I am 99% sure that the main issues are down to the fact the code is 5 years old and has been added to over the time so now it's a bit of a mess and the fact it uses PHP5.2 means it won't work at all on a PHP5.4 server. A problem when it appears most hosting services are moving over to PHP5.4.7.