PROs and CONs of languages and frameworks

Already 3 people interested! Oh yeah! :D

CMS's I would love to have an opinion on: 1) Wordpress 2) Joomla 3) Drupal 4) Prestashop 5) OpenCart

Frameworks I would love to have an opinion on: 1) Laravel 2) Zend 3) Yii 4) Meteor / Derby / Mojito

Hey Jason Seifer Nick Pettit , you guys should consider doing something like a round table discussion video with multiple teachers here on subjects like this.

I know this question has no clear answer and that you could probably talk about pros and cons of frameworks/CMS for days on end, but think of how beneficial that'd be. Industry professionals, discussing in what situations a particular tech might be appropriate. Simply discussion. Wouldn't have to have a clear cut answer in the end. Just food for thought for the many students here who have the same question.

As someone who has built on Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal, I've never felt more refreshed than the first time I watched the Rails courses here on Treehouse. But now that I choose to build in Rails most of the time, I still realize it isn't always the ideal solution for every project.

For instance, I almost always use Rails for personal projects, because I love Active Record's power and it integrates nicely with Ember.js. So I can build really cool, fun modern apps quickly.

But I would never build a site, for say a homebuilder, on that stack. Why? Because tools like Wordpress offer things like Custom Post Types that allow for rapid creation of content without having to put a lot of thought into model structure, routes, etc... And in the end you have something you can hand off to a client easily.

I use Drupal at work because we build state websites for Colorado government and Drupal provides many tools and things that are optimal for that sort of site. It's not the prettiest back-end (like Wordpress), but that's okay because it's powerful and our clients aren't primarily concerned about content creation; security and flexibility is their biggest concern.

Anyways, this is a long winded answer, but I see this question all the time and I remember the days of trying to figure out what to use of the plethora of options out there. The problem is, everyone just said "Pick the best tool for the job"... Well, yeah... But come on, there's gotta be a better way to provide clarity towards this difficult problem and I can think of no better way than simply being able to listen to a discussion between extremely smart people weighing the possibilities....

Ya feel me, Team Treehouse? :)