I wrote this in a comment to Drupal, how does it hold up to EE?

"As a rule, if the CMS puts you away from your page and to a list of "posts" to edit with TinyMCE, it's not modern. Atleast in my book."

I've never used Drupal, but EE gives you more than just a TinyMCE field. You can create as many fields as you want. The four defaults are text input, text area, date field, and file field, but you can add new fields through extensions to get WYSIWYG, table fields, etc etc.

These can then be ordered on the publish page how you want, made required fields, searchable, enable or disable HTML, etc, so it gives a lot of control.

But where are those fields put? If it's in a admin interface away from the site I wouldn't call it a modern system.

Yeah it's an admin interface away from the site.

I think non-techies would also prefer something simple and consistent, like logging in -> publish -> type in fields -> submit.

What about log in -> edit site -> publish? Edit site being direct manipulation of the content.

Being inside the content does not make it a "modern system".

Actually, it's a rather dumb idea too, except for very simple systems. Besides editing the content (title, body, etc) there are numerous others things to configure and edit that don't normally appear in the content area --so they would be out of place there.

But the bigger problem is that you have to navigate the content as an end user would in order to edit it. A specialized screen with filters, columns, search et al would be much faster to work with.

Editing title, body etc. is probably the most used tasks in a content system. Do you disagree?

Working fast is great, but with filters, columns and searches your adding complexity. We love working fast with complex systems. They don't (is my thesis).

What version do you use? I read that many of the plugins are not compatible with the new version of EE. Has that been your experience?

Also, is it easy for a single client to manage multiple sites?

I'm also curious how EE compares to Django ( I know it is not an apples to apples comparison)?

The backend is much better for clients than Django in my opinion, though personally I prefer Django.

As for multiple sites, there's an extension called the multi-site manager that allows you to control multiple sites through the one admin interface, which makes it much easier for our clients, all the different sites appear in a list and they can select which one to edit, then move on to the next.

We use the latest version and yes it means a few plugins aren't compatible, but they're catching up quickly and they're actually easy to update yourself if it's necessary and legal.