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Go here: http://www.opensourcecms.com/

Open Source CMS has the various offerings grouped by purpose/application/specialty. It also provides links to CMS demo sites.

FWIW, I'm using Concrete5. It's okay. Seems to be getting better.

I can also suggest trying e107: http://e107.org/

Looking at your skill set I would recommend e107 CMS at http://www.e107.org/

e107.

For those of you looking at CMSs... the site Open Source CMS is an invaluable resource. They allow you to demo all of the popular choices and choose which one you like the best.

e107 is easy to setup, completely free, has a built-in forum, has a ton of plugins, completely graphical management, and (this is the important part) a large tech support community.

http://www.e107.org/

I like E107. It's very useful and customizable and has a great theme and plugin developer community.

for me it suits everything from community sites, to corporate sites.

I was heavy into Drupal, until it was hacked. But I suspect it was a php security hole not Drupal. I decided to try e107, and so far I'm really impressed. Also has a good forum built in, and many themes which drupal didnt have.

http://e107.org/

Also, to compare Drupal with other sites and a ranking of popular CMS software, check out http://www.opensourcecms.com. Its good to know what each CMS software offers, and they had a trial section where you could log in as admin and see what the admin section was like. Thats very impressive.

But it's very, very weak security. If yu ahve a small site, it would be alright, but if you have something that is totally serious and can not be sabatoged, I'd encourage you look at something else. My recommendation is e107. Easy to use, fully featured and has a developer community for it.

Dreamweaver is an impressive behemoth of a tool, no doubt whatsoever. Back in 1999/2000 it was the only possible way to edit and manage websites on a professional level. Dreamweavers wysiwyg power with the older browsers and it's HTML editing features are unmatched. The template engine completely abstracts changes to a website in your developement directory and automatically keeps track of anything you what across multiple documents. If DW doesn't crash and screw up your template dir that is - which does happen more often than you like. It's the best thing you can use ... ...if you don't have a CMS.
Which gets me right to the point:
Sorry, but it's like five years since the early dot-bomb days where dynamic server side stuff was considered exotic and people got payed for klicking static websites together. You may haven't noticed, but the world has moved on. There are something like fifteen bazillion open source content management systems out there. One better than the next.
Who the fuck needs DW nowadays? You don't want DW! DWs concepts are ancient by todays standards. The last time I used it was about 4 years ago in some project where the system team couldn't get their stuff together and set up a halfway decent JSP framework and we had to hack the webdocs by hand in record time. And my web productivity has tripled by now, since I exclusively use content management systems (as every body else does), and be it "only" to generate the html docs offline and publish the output to static webspace.

Honestly now: Ditch DW allready, it's nothing but a huge waste of time these days. Trust me, I make a living with this stuff. And take a look at one of the frameworks above. To save your time, I recommend checking out one of the following: Plone/Zope, Callisto CMS, Mambo, Typo3, Mason, Slashcode, or (forgot this one above) Xoops. Save yourself half to three quarters of webdev time in the long run.
Oh, and welcome to 2005. ;-)

Easy to use/set-up, GPL license, and good (not perfect) XHTML strict compliance. Check it out if you have access to php/mysql

Though it's aimed more at CMS's rather than blogs, it's definatley a great place to try out multiple CMS's before installing them.

Check it out - OpenSourceCMS

My current favorites:
Mambo
Wordpress
E107
and last but not least Geeklog

e107

Not as well known as some others but a great choice. Sounds like what you are looking for.

In theory, I strongly agree with what you're saying. In practice, however, having set up my own Zope/CMF/Plone side on Debian unstable (yes, unstable) and Apache, I'm gonna have to disagree.

It took me a while to set up Zope/Plone. There's a nasty bug in Debian's distribution of Plone, but thankfully there's a super easy workaround in the BTS. It also took a couple visits to #plone@irc.gnu.org to set up an actual Plone instance, but in retrospect it wasn't that hard. I got the Apache passthrough working too. Now, Plone's setup phase is done. Anything I need to change is done via GUI, and the Structured Text system is perfect for marking up content without obfuscating it. Oh yeah, and the Structured Text was the only thing I actually had to look at the Plone docs for. It's probably even easier when you use them start to finish.

I've used e107, PostNuke, XOOPS, Slash, Scoop and probably a few others. They're all neat, but I've had way more problems with them all, from just plain failure to strange errors to lack of features. e107 does have a TON more themes available, though.

You say Zope is going in the wrong direction, but I fail to see how. With Zope, you can build webapps into your Plone site - just don't ask me how. With most PHP-based CMS's you still have to install an SQL server of some flavor, and I doubt if you can build webapps in. You complain about Zope/CMF/Plone being three-tiered, but really CMF is just an addon to Zope - it doesn't add complication. And I think it's pretty sweet to be able to manage all your Zope stuff through one interface - including all your Plone sites and whatever else you've got going. You also complain that Zope is a "closed world" because of the object database. Yeah, it's about as "closed" as any other website that has an FTP backend - i.e. NOT.

And as far as speed, I haven't noticed a bit of difference between Plone and e107 (the only other CMS I've ended up using for real). I'm not pretending I get any real traffic, though. But to balance that, I've got a horrible setup - at the moment a P4-1.4 with 256/RAM and a cable modem with an upload cap of 256Kb.

In short, Plone rules. Not sure how it does it, but it does.

I can only recommend e107 for a powerful yet user-friendly non-enterprise CMS solution.

It also has a Coppermine gallery plugin which works very well.

Two years ago I made a bet with a friend that Macromedia would release at least
one member of the dreamteam for linux. Obviously I lost the bet and now owe him
an icecream (cream, sauce and crunchy topping and all).
But I didn't lose because linux hasn't gained importance as I thought it would
have. On the contrary. Linux did gain importance, only macromedia has lost it. The
dot-bomb is long ago, all those wannabe dreamweaver-clickers are flipping burgers,
browsers actually support css now - a thing _nobody_ _ever_
thought would happen 3 years ago - and content management is the *only* way to
go for webstuff today, rendering dreamweavers impressive template engine
pointless. Impressive still, but yet pointless anyway.
As someone who has been doing web and internet design and programming
professionally for quite some time now I'd like to get some things straight in
the pro and con macromedia dreamteam flamewar:
1.) In the days when css was synonym for the crappiest implementation of
cross-plattform standards ever, Flash was the *only* way to make a good visual
appearance and be truly cross plattform. In fact, you'd be more compatible and
accessible with Flash than with anything beyond "table" and "href". That has
changed since then, with the appearance of NS 6.1 came a whole bunch of browsers
that manage css in a way that is fairly acceptable. Flash isn't needed for
professional design anymore. And since the macromedia people are the biggest
idiots in the entire universe when it come to building usable programming
plattforms and put an exceptional effort into keeping Flash MX and the
ActionScript object model just as crappy as ever one can almost rest ashure
that Flash will eventually fade into oblivion, just as Director is
(Praise the Lord!) doing now.
2.) Back in the we-don't-give-a-f*ck-about-webstandards time Dreamweaver was the
_only_ tool that would make webdevelopement possible. And I'm talking about real
webdevelopement - a concept argueably only grasped by the slashdot crowd on very
rare occasions. Actually Dreamweaver was the tool that would make sites
accessable for Linux. Nobody would handcode anything for NS 4.7, trust me on
that one. And dreamweaver still has features that strike an unexpierienced DW
user (read: less that 1 and a half years of DW usage) as perfect. Think of the
drag linking, it's ability to *not* touch hand edited code what so ever and the
template engine that was the only way to go when dynamic web application stuff
wasn't available. Yet most of these things are taken care of by the bazillion
server side technologies (and PHP CMSes) out there, so I - and all other
professionals I know of - haven't been using DW for 2 years or more.
Summary:
Flash and DW are both impressive apps (exclude anything that has to do with
programming in Flash/AS) - no matter what VI zealot keeps bullshitting about on /. -
but the bottom line is that they've both had their great time and it's doubtable if it will ever come back.
They've been outrun by JMF (that programming think that macromedia horribly failed at), OSS Content Management Systems and by
editors that blast DW/Homesite to chunky
kibbles.

It's been said a couple of times here all ready that you should make sure you're using the most appropriate tool for the job (a good philosphy in general). If you wanna check out some of the open-source CMS (Content Management Systems) out there to see what suits you best, you can visit OpenSourceCMS it has live demos of various CMS solutions that you can get a feel for--you can even log in as an admin and check out its admin interface. These are all free, but they're also all php/mysql based. I don't know if there's a similiar sites for other CMS/blog systems (MT uses Perl, for example), but Google probably has a pretty good idea. ;-)

I'm a bit partial to e107 myself, but I'll admit that I haven't tried a whole lot of them. ;-)

Happy blogging!