CMS - Drupal, Joomla, WordPress Recommendations

pipingguy writes: I've inherited a 2012 install of Joomla 1.5.26 that I'm about to update to 3.5 with SP Upgrade. Not being much of a CMS guy, it's proving to be interesting. I've built more than a few static websites (I use Sublime Text 3 or Atom, not some fancy-pants WYSIWYG doohickey) and am quite familiar with CSS, but databases not so much. I've been through lots of online documentation and am a bit bewildered but I'm following the recommendations regarding backups and the like.

What are Slashdot readers' latest opinions on the three most popular CMSes — Drupal, Joomla and WordPress?

Any tips for me before I accidentally blow away the existing site and have to rebuild everything and get yelled at?

Shadow site time

[Z00L00K]

If you want to try out a new version - run a shadow site with the new version and do massive amounts of test conversions of the data. When things goes as planned you should be able to essentially just switch over to the new site.

This is not an easy conversion

[Danny Mittleman]

1.5 to 3.5 is not an easy conversion as you have several interim conversions (with database changes that need be addressed) as well as you likely have extensions that convert poorly or not at all. The 1.5 to 2.5 (called 1.7 or 1.8 back when released) was particular messy. The 2.5 to 3.5 should be cleaner and easier to do--but still involves running internal routines to update the database. Further, 1.5 templates will not work with 3.5 so your template needs to be converted or replaced (which will be a s