Site Management for a medium-sized site

How do you manage your site?

[Fischerlaender]

I've got several content-rich medium-sized (about 100 content pages) web sites to maintain that are built with PHP, (non-standard) HTML and some MySQL parts (like a news tool).

I hesitate to use a full-featured CMS because of the installation hassel and the import of my buggy HTML-PHP-mixture.

What are you using for site management? Are you coping with Frontpage, Dreamweaver or the like? Are you using some custom built tools? Or is a "real" CMS the only way to go?

I know, a lot of very fuzzy questions, but I hope you got the basic idea of my problems.

[tedster]

I use Homesite for sites of 1,000 pages and even larger. I've never yet seen a CMS that matches the flexibility that pure mark-up and code can give. Homesite's "extended search and replace" is about all the razzle-dazzle I need.

For ease of updating on one large ecommerce site, I do generate flat pages from a database and a set of templates. But after several recent experiences, just seeing the initials "CMS" now triggers Post Traumatic Stress Dysfunction for me.

[Fischerlaender]

I've never yet seen a CMS that matches the flexibility that pure mark-up and code can give.

Flexibility - this is exactly the point that gives me some headache. Most of my pages would perfectly fit for a CMS, but there are several which I cannot (easily) maintain with a CMS. This is the reason why I'm hesitating to switch to a CMS.

Homesite's "extended search and replace" is about all the razzle-dazzle I need.

I'm using Ultraedit which is also nearly perfect for this kind of work.

just seeing the initials "CMS" now triggers Post Traumatic Stress Dysfunction for me

I'm sorry for that. ;-)

My intention is to migrate the sites to a standard compliant and table-less XHTML design, which I hope should be very easy to maintain with Ultraedit and, if needed, some Perl scripts. It's good to hear that I'm not the only one staying away from CMS.

I'm also looking for web sites or books with some best practice examples on modern site management. I searched Google and Amazon, but to no avail.