Anne, I am still not sure what you mean. Certainly, there is a lot of demand for PHP developers of various sorts, but there is an even larger supply, and a heck of a lot of very bad PHP code that they are cut-and-paste-ing together to create sites.

Standing out from a very large crowd is that much more difficult, and the ceiling for your rates is correspondingly lower.

Now, far be it from me to advocate choosing a system solely because of it’s small marketshare, but I do think that tools should be chosen by balancing the following considerations:

* overall marketshare

* the ratio of demand to supply (this is hard to estimate, but a good proxy is the average salary for people with that skill)

* productivity

* the degree to which a tool/platform/language will be applicable to future markets or problem domains

Of these, I consider overall marketshare to be the least important crtiteria.

You already know what primary set of tools I’ve chosen based on those criteria, so I won’t belabor the point.

rick: thanks for the suggestions and info. I’m not familiar with Expression Engine or pMachine; will check those out.

Textpattern is interesting. One of the easiest blog/light CMS tools with which to build a site in that it supports the concept of sections natively (no odd workarounds needed).

Also check out Expression Engine (at pmachine.com). I’ve built sites with its predecessor, the eponymous pMachine. EE is more powerful and seems like a very nice choice for certain uses.

http://raibledesigns.com/page/rd?entry=open_source_cms_evalation_part

also curious as to whether or not you’ve checked out TextPattern.