There isn't a Content Management System/Platform/Framework that I would rate a 5. Each of the available options has its shortcomings. That being said, I believe drupal to be a best in class platform. It is designed for performance, security, extensibility, and more.

For managers looking for power platform to manage their content there is rarely a time when drupal isn't the best option.

For developers and engineers there's an api and community that can help you build and extend drupal in more directions that I can imagine.

Plus, each new version is better than the last.

Disclaimer: I spend a lot of time hacking on and with drupal so I have at least a small bias :)

I work with Drupal day in and day out, building websites for churches and ministris (over at mustardseedmedia.com). Drupal isn't perfect. It has many failings. But, since it's a framework (not really a consumer-oriented CMS) a good developer can make those failures completely transparent and invisible to the end user (and the client).

Drupal can truly do anything you can dream. There is no limit to it's flexibility and customizability. It has a steep learning curve, but once you get over the hard part, it's amazing at the landscape that stretches out before you.

As a designer, I can't tell you how easy it is to design a Drupal website. As a user-experience guy, I can tell you that it's got a long way to go in order to become "user friendly". Overally, Drupal is the most powerful system I've seen. It's the most security conscious. It's the most flexible. And all these together make it the system we chose to create every single site we build.

I'd give it a 4.5 if I could...but since I can't, I'll go with a 4, since it still needs work on the learning curve, documentation, and user friendliness.

I love Drupal, I've reached a point to where I try not to use anything else. Granted I don't have a whole lot of experience in other CMS's other than some quick Joomla installs and some work with Wordpress, but Drupal has seemed to spoil my impression of anything else that I've tried. I think it sets a bar of what should be expected now and it's hard to find something that really compares.

The only thing is the learning curve. People tend to install Drupal and then aren't sure where to go from there. But I have yet to give a few pointers to a newbie and not see their eyes light up with their understanding of the power at their fingertips.

As a designer-turning-themer, Drupal is my developer, and I have yet to have a project where Drupal hasn't impressed the client in speed of setup, functionality, and expandability. I think above all is the community that backs it, they make it very valuable to me. I give it 5 stars.

I have been using drupal almost exclusively since 4.6 and I can't imagine using anything else at this point. It has allowed me to provide my small church with a feature rich, user accessible site that didn't require me to spend umteen hundred hours a week maintaining. I have been able to train the church staff to do the small, regular updates (events and announcements) while I take care of the sermon podcasting and any other one off updates.

The leadership of my church is very happy with the potential uses that drupal affords and we are planning a site now that all our supported missions will be providing content to while leaving the main site more of a brochure style site.

The drupal community has been EXTREMELY helpful to me with the addition of new modules and themes.

I am a part-time web developer who does this work commercially but has another full time career. I am entirely self-taught, beginning with hand-coding standards-compliant websites in XHTML Transitional and CSS by reading the entire specifications for both and working from there, moving on to using blogging platforms like MovableType and WordPress, and having built one eCommerce site with ZenCart before discovering Drupal when Übercart became available. Since I have feet in both the designer and developer camps, I was attracted to Drupal by reports of its extensibility essentially without limits. I also heard of its famous learning curve. I have found that to be true.

If you know a lot about how websites work, and even just know enough about PHP and MySQL databases in the vague sort of way that means you're not scared by them, it is relatively easy to get your first Drupal website 80% up and running. Drupal has, however, great depth, and unfortunately sometimes things that seem like fairly obvious use-cases are indeed hidden in those depths. As noted above, Drupal is a "framework", meaning it is your foundation rather than everything you need. I think that mindset has meant however that not enough attention has been paid to how to sensibly expose functionality in layers, so that the most important and obvious use cases are immediately presented to a new site builder, before they are exposed to more complex site functionality. (The following will likely only make sense if you have already done a lot of reading about Drupal: in order to achieve the level of integration I am envisaging, more functionality would probably also need to move from just being "contrib" to being some sort of officially blessed almost-core, if not actually moving into Drupal core itself. In that regard, I am pleased to see CCK and Views becoming part of core in Drupal 7, for instance.)

I will be deploying my first Drupal website, a community site with multiple columnists, with forums, with an eCommerce store based on Übercart, and with CRM functionality using CiviCRM, in c. the next month. Time and again, I have had to spend significant time digging to find how to achieve things that I could have rapidly hand coded. Once the solutions were found, they were usually quite straightforward, but often just obscured amidst other options and not always in the most logical place. There is evidence the Drupal community is aware of these issues, has made some progress in Drupal 6 (which I am using), and will make further progress in Drupal 7. I hope Drupal 8 really starts to nail things in this area.

Having found Drupal, I have no doubt that it is far more valuable to me than any of the previous platforms that I have used, and now that I am familiar with it I would use it for any client who wanted more than a single page site—even for relatively static postcard-style content. I currently have three Drupal 6 sites at various stages of development, and two further sites in planning. I don't plan to look back.

So would I recommend Drupal? Absolutely. The learning curve will be steep, there are pressure points in that which will be frustrating. But it will definitely be worth it.

Like Rob, I would rate it 4.5 if I could. I'll give it a five, so his vote and mine will average to what we actually wanted to give it. :)

Clean clear coding conventions assist developers and non-developers alike.

I love the extensive modules available including;

CCK, Views, Backup-Migrate, Pathauto, BUEditor, Fivestar, Simple News, Google Analytics

and groups.drupal.org