Prebuilt software like WordPress (which this blog uses), Drupal, Joomla, and other similar systems are bad for innovation. There… I said it. I love WordPress after avoiding it for years. The past 2 weeks have been the best 2 weeks of blogging in my life. And these tools are great for 95% of use cases- most sites will benefit immensely from putting them in the engine box.
Although I haven’t used it, Drupal sounds like WordPress on steroids, with an attached boat anchor to slow you down. My friend Jeremy over at QuitYourDayJob lost two weeks of his life trying to teach it to sit, stay, and fetch. Now it works great.
These tools are immensely powerful, don’t get me wrong. But they are really optimized for doing something that has already been done. If you want a simple blog, brochure site, forum, simple social networking features, etc, then this will get you there quickly. Not a bad strategy if you can find a corner of the market without good coverage yet. But this blog is about innovation, and doing things that haven’ t been done before.
If you really want to do something unique and revolutionary, relying on a CMS will kill you dead. Imagine if the guys who built Twitter started out with a CMS platform and went from there. You think Twitter has problems now 
There are a lot of people “gunning” to be the next Facebook, Myspace, etc. They are not using a CMS either.
So if you are new to all this, step back and think about other tools that are available. Personally, I recommend and use Ruby on Rails extensively. Python with Django is quite strong as well. The main difference with these things is that you can write applications that do things that haven’t been done before, or at least haven’t been done by thousands of other people.
