How to choose a content management system (CMS)? | web development and interactive agency: dotsamazing.com

There are a multitude of CMS (content management system) solutions out there with different philosophy behind. There are open source CMSes with many optional addons (Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla); projects lead by small developer groups made for the needs of small communities; there are discontinued CMSes and ofcourse all the web developer companies has their own range of solutions too.

There are more than one good choices, depending on our needs and facilities. Looking for the best CMS, or the one doing its job fine is enough? Give complex content editing tasks to experienced and patient workmates in an advanced, technically challenging yet jack-of-all-trades editor - or solve daily tasks with a single click, and feel safer with a user friendly CMS? There's also the price: don't forget though that choosing a CMS also comes with a provider with a yet unknown level of experience and professionalism. It's also the income that motivates the provider to fulfil a successful project.

As we're playing in this very league, building websites, community and media portals, complex softwares and special applications, we're following the CMS industry to keep up with our own CMS. Let's see what are the differences between CMS-es:

ease of use: most CMSes aim to be user friendly, however open source CMSes are very varying in this area, especially the addons that are not controlled of the core developers.
free to use: "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black." - Henry Ford's saying about the Model T in 1909 is relevant for open source (free license) CMSes right now: it's fine until you don't want something different.
flexible functionality: mostly open source systems have tons of addons available. However, addons are living their own life: they're released as separate software and they may or may not work with the actual CMS version. They're created and hopefully maintained by independent developers - when they have the time and until are still motivated. Only the few dozens of the best plugins work always fine, are user friendly, compatible with multilingual systems. Unfortunately you may not even find the addon functionality you're looking for.
special needs: special needs need special treatment, as there are no universal CMSes and will never be. There are many CMS systems and are all "universal" for the use cases their authors could think of. Let's see a typical example: creating a multilingual website. A website can be multilingual by translating every single page to every language that needs to be supported or you may choose not to translate all pages to all languages. Apart from contents the "frame" of the pages (header, footer, contact form, etc.) must be multilingual, and also all the interactive functionality like registration pages, notification e-mails and similar programmatically working parts. Should you need a webshop or some e-business related website, the CMS needs to cope with not only languages but different currencies, taxes (VAT), measurement units (metric/SI, Imperial, etc.), time zones. There are many similar questions when thinking of internationalization - and these problems can be only partially covered with ready-made solutions.
design and layout flexibility
error handling
security