My experience: I've built about 3 sites using Drupal 5, and played around lightly with Drupal 6. >> "is there a better solution to Drupal?" Yes, definitely.

My experience: I've built about 3 sites using Drupal 5, and played around lightly with Drupal 6. >> "is there a better solution to Drupal?" Yes, definitely. I think a lot of the problems I had with Drupal 5 was due to the limitations of PHP. It felt like there was a lot of "magic" happening behind the scenes, and you had to cater to that magic to make things work. You didn't have nicely defined classes like you do in other languages to handle the MVC components. So you'd always be passing around these cumbersome associative arrays that are nested 3 levels deep to make the framework behave as expected. I think Drupal is a great choice if you're using PHP, since the community is so active. A better question would be: why are you using PHP? I switched to Python and started using Pylons and Django for all my web projects, and I never looked back. Python is a beautiful and productive language, and allows you to build stuff really quickly. It's very explicit and opinionated, and there's not too much magic happening.