Craft CMS

[dirtynine]

Anyone use it? Looking to use it?  Running away from it? Currently in the middle of a CMS evaluation for a largish institutional site.  Drupal is the defacto choice / known quantity; Craft is the upstart challenger.  Assuming things like implementation cost and in-house expertise are relatively equal, is there anything that Craft does to set it apart?  Templating? User management? Security / upgradability?  Stuff that devs or admins love/hate? 
 
Drupal is a fairly safe choice in 2015; Craft is a bit niche right now.  I have a suspicion that Craft may be in the ascendency (and Drupal going in the other direction).  If anyone has strong opinions, love to hear them. 

 

[SeoulSoxFan]

We've been working with ExpressionEngine for 8 years now, and Craft for last 2. The guys who developed it cut their teeth on making some of the better add-ons for EE. 
 
It's rock solid and -- fully biased -- much preferable to Drupal. Then again, I liked EE over Drupal 8 years ago so there. 
 
A few missing pieces though. There are no real events modules. We build sites for universities fairly regularly and that's a major drawback. A law school we're building a site for now could not go for Craft just for this reason (we're staying with EE for that one). Membership side of it is also iffy, especially if it needs to be a paid subscription model. 
 
Having said that, its ability to create true repeatable content modeling is pretty slick. So is the Twig template engine and YII framework. Also has a single-click updates, and very few CMS can touch that. The add-on developers are dedicated and generally really nice folks (many are cross-developing/coming over from EE camp). 
 
So if events is a deal breaker, I'd highly recommend EE if you're looking for something other than Drupal. We just built SantaFe.com & six of its radio stations with it. We built TopGear.com with it a few years back also (got to meet the creative director, which was cool, but not Jeremy and his gang. I did get a signed brand book and that was more than enough). 
 
You're right about Craft is ascending -- try Google trends search for Drupal/EE/Craft. Volume aside, Craft is doing very well. I'd jump on it even if it's not for this project. 
 
P.S. I do a lot of training on EE (we also run Creat-ee.com) and we'll be offering Craft lessons before end of the year. We have a few unpublicized private tutoring sessions going on Craft for now.