Hi,

I'm giving my site some long-overdue lovin', and moving from static to dynamic in the process (PHP5.3 + MySQL5.0). I'd like to pick the assembled brains about which CMS to choose.

On one level I wasn't sure if I even wanted to go CMS at all, as a homebrew site might be leaner (no stuff I wouldn't need) and more satisfying to do, but realistically I doubt I have the time for that.

That said, I'd likely find myself wanting to do some original stuff on the site, and have this be as pure as possible, BUT while still leveraging the look-and-feel continuity provided by the CMS.

I've run a Joomla 1.5 site for a couple of years, and while I had success in modifying themes and plugins (custom modules) for my needs, the prospect of writing my own addons from scratch, or using it in a modular way, seems daunting.

Another site I'm involved with is mainly original code (as far as I know; I don't get to see the back-end) but uses Wordpress for certain components. (I don't know whether they chose it because it's easy to use as a component in this way, or because the back-end UI is user-friendly for the "mortals" who use it though.)

Then of course there are others, widely-used but that I know little about, such as Drupal and Concrete5.

So, if I wanted to allow for largely self-contained PHP applications to reside on my site side-by-side with my CMS, but making use of it for the presentation layer, would you recommend any particular CMS to achieve this? Or would I be better just sticking with a templating system or somesuch?

Any input very welcome.