I'm going to have to 2nd what Steve A. said. I've been apart of the Beta group since before release and was on the craft chats for the beta and it's absolutely the best thing out hands down.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a CMS though. It's been labeled as one and yes it is one but I feel it should be labeled as a CMF/S. Their plugin development API is absolutely amazing. It really does give access to the entire Yii Framework to do build whatever you want to build, but sets it up in a way that whatever you're building is working correctly with the CMS itself correctly and as efficiently as possible.
Obviously most people in here are Designers... so Twig, Crafts templating is the best thing you'll use to date. Coming from WP / ExpressionEngine and also a background in CodeIgnitor / Laravel frameworks... working with Twig is best. It doesn't have a Parse order, so you never have to worry about View Data being correctly set inside of includes or partials, which means template organization and reusability sky rockets which also means productivity and workflow skyrockets.
I haven't even started talking about the concepts behind setting up the types of content the CMS will handle. Brandon and the peeps at Pixel and Tonic have done an outstanding job of being extremely thoughtful about what it means to be a CMS and how to handle content, what content is, what type of content that is and how it should be related to other content.
What's so fantastic about the way that Craft handles content is they've learned from all the mistakes from Wordpress / Drupal and ExpressionEngine and alot of the other major CMSes.
Pros of CraftCMS -> WAY to many to count, it just keeps getting better and better the more and more I develop with it.
Cons of CMS -> the ABSOLUTE ONLY downside to CraftCMS right now is the Plugin Community. There aren't as many plugins yet and the only real reason for that is because its still in it's early life of a being a CMS, but it's picking up EXTREMELY fast, they just released a new API called the ElementType API which has changed the game again for plugin development. Take a look over at http://straightupcraft.com/craft-plugins which keeps a pretty up to date list of plugins for Craft, this list is only from people who submit their plugin though, so there are probably many more that are not listed.
I really feel the whole "Wordpress has its place" excuse has been played out. It's not even a "framework" - It's a Blogging platform that has been hacked to flipping pieces to work like a CMS, but it will NEVER be a CMS because..... well, ITS NOT A CMS. The only thing that WP has on anything else is it's Plugin Community, which even that is a disaster because you have tons of people writing crappy code that don't keep their code updated for each WP release and shit starts breaking left and right, which causes clients to spend more money in the long run.
I guess "Wordpress has its place" isn't completely wrong, it does... as a blogging platform. Are you building a simple blog with no other functionality or no other type of content other then an "Article"? Then go for it, if not.. do yourself a favor and keep yourself from the pain and agony of WP and just use something else, preferably CraftCMS because you will see the benefits IMMEDIATELY.
I'm going to have to 2nd what Steve A. said. I've been apart of the Beta group since before release and was on the craft chats for the beta and it's absolutely the best thing out hands down.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a CMS though. It's been labeled as one and yes it is one but I feel it should be labeled as a CMF/S. Their plugin development API is absolutely amazing. It really does give access to the entire Yii Framework to do build whatever you want to build, but sets it up in a way that whatever you're building is working correctly with the CMS itself correctly and as efficiently as possible.
Obviously most people in here are Designers... so Twig, Crafts templating is the best thing you'll use to date. Coming from WP / ExpressionEngine and also a background in CodeIgnitor / Laravel frameworks... working with Twig is best. It doesn't have a Parse order, so you never have to worry about View Data being correctly set inside of includes or partials, which means template organization and reusability sky rockets which also means productivity and workflow skyrockets.
I haven't even started talking about the concepts behind setting up the types of content the CMS will handle. Brandon and the peeps at Pixel and Tonic have done an outstanding job of being extremely thoughtful about what it means to be a CMS and how to handle content, what content is, what type of content that is and how it should be related to other content.
What's so fantastic about the way that Craft handles content is they've learned from all the mistakes from Wordpress / Drupal and ExpressionEngine and alot of the other major CMSes.
Pros of CraftCMS -> WAY to many to count, it just keeps getting better and better the more and more I develop with it.
Cons of CMS -> the ABSOLUTE ONLY downside to CraftCMS right now is the Plugin Community. There aren't as many plugins yet and the only real reason for that is because its still in it's early life of a being a CMS, but it's picking up EXTREMELY fast, they just released a new API called the ElementType API which has changed the game again for plugin development. Take a look over at http://straightupcraft.com/craft-plugins which keeps a pretty up to date list of plugins for Craft, this list is only from people who submit their plugin though, so there are probably many more that are not listed.
I really feel the whole "Wordpress has its place" excuse has been played out. It's not even a "framework" - It's a Blogging platform that has been hacked to flipping pieces to work like a CMS, but it will NEVER be a CMS because..... well, ITS NOT A CMS. The only thing that WP has on anything else is it's Plugin Community, which even that is a disaster because you have tons of people writing crappy code that don't keep their code updated for each WP release and shit starts breaking left and right, which causes clients to spend more money in the long run.
I guess "Wordpress has its place" isn't completely wrong, it does... as a blogging platform. Are you building a simple blog with no other functionality or no other type of content other then an "Article"? Then go for it, if not.. do yourself a favor and keep yourself from the pain and agony of WP and just use something else, preferably CraftCMS because you will see the benefits IMMEDIATELY.