CustomerCentrix

No doubt there are Plenty of Choice in Open-Source CMS as described in this article on eWeek. We have chosen Drupal for our web site (not truly a CMS as we are using it) which gets a mention near the end of the article. I am not sure that I agree with the assessment that the top issues in choosing a system are:

Usability
DBMS

Usability is certainly critical, but seems to me secondary to fitting the needs of the users. With such a huge number of applications to choose from, narrowing the options is key. Features and platform are relatively quick and easy ways to do that. Usability is another, but is irrelevant if the features and platform are not appropriate. Usability is also much more difficult to assess.

DBMS to me also seems a smaller issue if only because MySQL is so prevalent. If you eliminated products that use MySQL, I suspect that you would not have many left over. So few of the open-source products do not run on MySQL that this seems hardly a major issue. The example provided of MySQL getting maxed on a site with 3 mil page views per month seems invalid to me since there is no mention of what application is used or alternatives. I know that MySQL is often used for high traffic web sites and applications and would not hesitate to use it for this kind of site. I would not say the same about applications, meaning that different CMS's can have hugely different performance characteristics with exactly the same database. I suspect that there is a lot of truth to the next statement in the article that a DBA may be good idea. Indeed, this might be more important than the choice of database. While I expect that MySQL might not scale or perform as well as one of the commercial products (Oracle, DB2 or SQL Server) on a huge system, a few million page views per month are not huge by today's standards. My guess is that eGullet has other problems, but the database choice is an easy scapegoat.

Interesting also that Magnolia was mentioned. This one seems fairly new, and has been positively reviewed a couple of times recently. I looked at it briefly, but not until after we had decided to use Drupal for some of our needs.