Need help choosing the right CMS

[roldar]

Over the past few months I've had some ideas for various web sites. I taught myself HTML and know some very basic asp/ado that I use for my database-driven portal. I'm the kind of person that likes to understand everything that's going on in anything I code so that I know how to tweak and fix it if necessary, and also beacuse I just like to know for the sake of it. However, as I start to get more involved with my projects it's apparent that I can't very well learn all the technical aspects as well as manage the business and content end of things. Just not enough time in the day.

I spent hours and hours making my current web portal look all pretty with tables inside of tables inside of tables (all constructed in notepad - *wimper*). My web portal loads quickly and is very simplistic, and I'd like to keep it that way. Each page is around 5-10 kb. I'm currently in the stage of hooking up the various functions of it to my Access database, but before I spend another couple weeks doing that I was wondering if a CMS is the way I should go. I'd also like to use mySQL, but I don't have any experience with it. So I was wondering how easy it is to customize a CMS to do only the things I want it to do, and to add things it doesn't currently have built in.

1) I need to allow people to register a username/password for the site.
2) I need a forum of some kind. I'd really like one that is integrated throughout the site so that, for instance, when people are looking at the movie reviews section they can write their own comments about a movie, etc. I suppose I could just link to a movie topic in a general forum.
3) I need to be able to customize the forms so that they gather all the information I need from people. 4) I need the ability to add new features to the site as I go.
6) I would prefer a cookie-free site that has users enter their username and password when they're adding something to the site or sending messages to other users. This isn't a deal-breaker, though.
7) My current webhost, with which I have a year contract, supports php, asp, mySQL, and Access. They run "IIS 6.0 with Window 2003 Server". I noticed that many CMS' require an Apache server. To be honest I don't know if these things are mutually exclusive or not. My host is webhost4life dot com if somebody could tell me if they're compatible with a CMS that fits my needs I would appreciate it.

Are my needs too much for a CMS, or is there a solution for me? I could attempt to get my portal running from scratch, but as I go I see that there's a lot of coding that I simply don't have the time to learn and then write. Sorry for rambling on about all that, but I've just spent so much time working on this site and it's turning into the never-ending project. I'd just like to focus on the content and advertising of my site rather than the development.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I thank you in advance.

[encyclo]

A few ideas here: [webmasterworld.com...] - if your host has PHP and mySQL, then there are loads of choices which will do what you want. Normally, you don't need Apache specifically, so most will work very well - but there are also many ASP-based CMS systems out there.

As for Access and mySQL, I would strongly recommend using mySQL, which is much more scaleable than Access, which is good for very small applications only.