Need CMS with lots of customization

[subgenius]

I have a potential client that has a web site that relies pretty heavily on their current CMS (not sure of provider yet). They want my company to redesign their site, and the ideas that I have rely a lot more on visuals. The new site I have in mind would probably require either a custom-coded CMS or an existing CMS package that allows for a lot of flexibility as far as layout is concerned.

Does anyone know of a designer-friendly CMS? If it's a pre-existing package, would updates to the CMS cause a lot of site maintenance nightmares?

Thanks in advance for any input.

[reprint]

I dont think there is an easy answer to that. I assume you mean flexible visual presentation and most CMS have themes etc that you can customize. If you stick to adapting those and not the core files then you have nothing to worry about when updating.
If you need something more, then you might be better going for a custom CMS.
You could approach a good theme designer for the CMS you are thinking about and see if your design can be implemented. They should give you a straight answer. Ask them to point you to a similar template they have done.

[fside]

I would just imagine that the problem with any CMS app is that it is pre-packaged. If what you need isn't part of the package, it might not have the flexibility you'll then require. If you run into a 'small' feature you need, that 'small' item could be the deal-breaker. It might require more than you anticipated. 'Small' changes sometimes do. That is, whatever you want to do, it has to somehow be part of the package.

[mustardman]

Check out Drupal. I'm not a coder and I was able to have it doing backflips for me after about a week.

[ergophobe]

>>allows for a lot of flexibility as far as layout is concerned

All the CMS that I know allow 100% flexibility with respect to layout. For the overall look and feel site-wide, there are hardly any restrictions and, if you want to get tricky, you can even have things change by subareas. Then you can often have specific layouts for specific page types.

A couple of examples

Drupal
In drupal you can create content types with the CCK plugin (this thing is genius) which allows you to create a set of fields that have semantic meaning, labels and associated help text. You can then use ConTemplate (again, absolute genius) to create specific templates that handle the display of these specific content types and you can do so by cloning existing content types if there is a lot of overlap. Any more flexible than that and you would lose any coherence in your design. And then for "directory" pages (middle levels of hierarchy) you can use the Views module to invoke a broad array of display options so that the page has intro text, default text if there are no "nodes", display as snippets, as tabular listings etc etc. Are there limits? Of course, but the flexibility is incredible.

ModX
ModX uses a similar concept where you create base templates, template variables and then stipulate which template to apply to a given page/page type and you can select which template vars are available on which page types and so on and so forth. Much like Drupal in the end, but perhaps not as refined (but then again, ModX is at version 0.9).

In both cases, *none* of the page-specfic and content-specific templating requires you to edit a single file - it's all through the admin interface.

[ergophobe]

>>the problem with any CMS app is that it is pre-packaged.

Yes and no. For mature packages like drupal, joomla, wordpress the number of plugins is absolutely dizzying. If you are offering a unique service that involves a lot of programming, then you'll likely have to do that outside the CMS, but drupal does allow custom PHP on the page and ships with the JQuery library, so even there many things can be done inside the CMS requiring PHP and Javascript.

With respect to manipulating content (text, image, video, flash), and site functionality (enhanced profiles, contact forms, etc etc) there is usually an add-on for it and if there isn't, you can still hire someone to program a moduleThat keeps you from modifying the core and makes upgrades possible.

I think the downsides of popular CMS are more on the security and performance sides. Not that they have bad security, but like any super-common entry point, they make nice targets for automated probing.