easy to use cms?

I use Wordpress for the majority of my blogs and/or create my own.

WP is originally a blog, but with all the extended features (thermes, plugins) it's relatively easy to make a "CMS" out of it. 🙂

A bit late, but there's a php-fusion bridge supplied with eFiction.  It's the CMS, I'm currently using.  There's also an SMF bridge.

(Just a note, for me portals are the equivalent of CMS's, or at least the type of portals I look for)

Recently I spend a great deal of time fiddling around with Drupal and Joomla!, Both are decent CMS's but for me they really don't work outside of the box as I'd like them to. I ended up downloading many extensions/plugin/mods, but I think this is generally the case for CMS's, then comes finding out how to bridge them, or what mods you'll need.

So far for one of my major sites I've stuck with SMF with Tiny Portal (more commonly known as TP), and I'd like to in the future switch to phpBB3 which is a great improvement from phpbb2. And there are several 'portal' options available, but only one I'd like to use, and 99% of the mods are still in early development stages.

I think it all depends on what you're looking for, I highly suggest testing out demos of software before choosing. OpenSourceCMS.com offers a majority of them.

I have recently switched to Joomla from html pages and I found it to be simple. After looking around the program for a couple of hours I was able to create a site without help from other people, help files, or forums. Joomla has a long list of components you can install (and installation is as simple as download, upload) and you can choose which you like best and what is necessary for your site. You dont have a ton of unused garbage sitting on your server, taking up space because you only install those functions you want. A joomla/efiction bridge is currently in beta testing and you can follow its progress in - I think it's - the efiction 3 mod forum here. According to the developer (Brat) you can install it after the fact. If you want a look at a joomla site I recently built, go here: www.snowmobilesrock.com

I have just put in a tikiwiki and so far am really loving it. It has forums, chat room, shout, quizzes, FAQ,  polls, galleries and a whole bunch of stuff I havent even turned on. the wiki page creation is very easy and it uses articles much like the TP in SMF as well. It also gives you very detailed control over member group permissions, which is very useful. And it isnt terribly hard to skin either and is mulitlingual.

The forum isnt as powerful as the SMF, but if you want an all in one site, it woudl certianly do the job. As for support, i have had both good and bad experiences over there. Sometimes you get a curt 'read the docs' and other times they are very helpful. Although i have found the 'docs' is pretty useless for the most part and have figured out everything myself.

Did you bridge it to eFiction?

No, as i am too nervous to do any bridge lol and my coding is sufficient to get me out of some trouble, but not the kind of bridgin trouble i read about on the forums.

I would dearly love to bridge my efiction to my SMF to my coppermine to my new tikiwiki.  But it seems like there is usually more trouble with bridges and then when upgrade for one of them come around .... i am just too intimidated and scared to do it.  😛

I have called it the pretenderpedia and it can be found here if you want a look  http://www.pretendercentre.com/pretenderpedia/

I want to use it as a recs site for members, the pages are easy to make and link and they can make their own recs pages with summaries, pics, links to the stories on the efiction with relative ease.