Flexible intranet development. Taking thoughts.

[eluser]BrianDHall[/eluser]
You might also want to spend a little time and go ahead and try out a CMS, try putting up together a simple hello world sort of site and make changes. I did this with Magento (more ecommerce than pure CMS, admittedly) and hit a brick wall as soon as I got beyond the GUI - endless files, non-existant documentation, unhelpful tutorials, such a mess. I tried Joomla and found basic core functionality, like their category system, fundamentally worthless for my project and would need re-writing anyway. Drupal seems great, but if everyone says its hard to learn than I'm willing to believe them and I don't wanna bother

Its really a question of how closely a pre-packaged system meets your needs. If you have do re-invent their core functionality there might be no point in messing with the complexities of someone else's system when you don't really need their extra features.

I've seen sites use Wordpress very smartly, and I've seen sites use it and suffer months of development by an entire team when one person could have built it from scratch in CodeIgniter.

If the system closely matches what you want and is closely analogous, go for it. If its a stretch at best (my predecessor thought posting coupons was logically similar to posting articles, and thereby slammed his head against a brick wall instead of making genuine progress), I've yet to find any point in reinventing someone else's wheel.