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Content management systems have become extremely popular over the past few years. In the PHP universe two of the most popular solutions are WordPress and Drupal. But one doesn't necessarily have to choose a popular one, right?

While WordPress is more suitable for blogs, I know for a fact that it has been used to meet all sort of requirements, way beyond a simple blogging platform. Personally I don't like WordPress, last time I looked at the code I was sceptical to say the least. With that said, I appreciate there are several themes and plugins available. But as I understand PHP, JavaScript, CSS and XHTML, I am not too scared to get my hands dirty with some code.

Drupal's modular approach would probably suit me though I've only used version 6. I'm tempted to give Drupal 7 a try but frankly I've had so many issues with Drupal 6 that I'm reluctant to spend even half an hour trying it out. Plus, performance has always been an issue with Drupal, particularly when page caching isn't an option. The sheer amount of database queries that are executed just to serve one page is appalling.

I heard very positive feedback about ExpressionEngine and I would give it a try if only I had any previous experience with CodeIgniter.
At the same time the fact that EE is built on CI means that the application is way more robust than the typical function-based, PHP 4 open source application.
Also, I kind of like the idea to pay for a commercial product: My technical questions would possibly be answered by technical people, not by some random guy who has been using the application for a week or so.
Finally, EllisLab seem a fairly solid company and the community, while nowhere near as large as Drupal's (for rather obvious reasons), seems thriving.

Finally, the other solution I've been considering for some time is SilverStripe. What I like of SilverStripe is its easy to use UI and the powerful and robust framework that powers it, Sapphire. There is a book that promises to explain how to use it professionally though at this stage I don't really have time to read anything.

Pimcore seems a rock-solid solution: built on Zend Framework and ExtJS, it's released under a BSD licence. The documentation looks alright though probably it is not very popular at this stage, also considering that it requires PHP 5.3 which is a problem, at least for the time being. Not too surprisingly, it doesn't use namespaces, most likely because ZF doens't support them yet.
Shame it doesn't use Doctrine 2 as the ORM of choice bur rather relies fully on Zend models. It makes perfect sense and I can't really see a problem with that, only I prefer Doctrine 2 ;)

I am sure there are several other options that should be taken into account. Unfortunately I will hardly have time to carry out a thorough analysis of SilverStripe and Pimcore, these are the two options I tend to favour.
Ultimately, based on my experience with ZF I would choose Pimcore though it will be problematic to push my company's sysadmins to upgrade our web server(s) to PHP 5.3 as I understand there are technical reasons as to why we're sticking to 5.2.

I think I only 2 working days to make a decision, yikes!