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There's a PHP framework called SPIP http://www.spip.net/ that presents the opportunity to do much of what OO could bring to HTML.
And the community at http://www.spip-contrib.net/ have frameworks built ON TOP of that which are form-filling exercises to provide variables as you so describe for your formatting, e.g. sarka-spip.
SPIP 3 allows you to create and manipulate your own custom-defined objects - I've done it myself.
It's just another CMS, sure, but it's basically mandated for all French government public bodies, so it's not going away in a hurry.

Oh, and it's free.
And international.
And it EVEN recognises UTF-8 ;)

For the best multi-lingual modular FREE system, use http://www.spip.net/.
It's basically mandatory for French public institutions, but it still works brilliantly when you power it up in English. Or any other common language.
The support community is naturally mostly French, but I found the English crowd to be very enthusiastic and helpful too.
Almost all of the documentation is translated into English, German, Spanish, Esperanto, etc etc - this makes it really easy to find support staff.
There are multiple template systems ready to go.
And it's written in PHP5, so you can easily add or tweak whatever you want.
Have a look at http://contrib.spip.net/?lang=en for the most common add-on libraries.
http://herbier.spip.net/?lang=en provides a list of all declared SPIP sites on the internet - some of them are pretty cool ...

For the best multi-lingual modular FREE system, use http://www.spip.net/.
It's basically mandatory for French public institutions, but it still works brilliantly when you power it up in English. Or any other common language.
The support community is naturally mostly French, but I found the English crowd to be very enthusiastic and helpful too.
Almost all of the documentation is translated into English, German, Spanish, Esperanto, etc etc - this makes it really easy to find support staff.
There are multiple template systems ready to go.
And it's written in PHP5, so you can easily add or tweak whatever you want.
Have a look at http://contrib.spip.net/?lang=en for the most common add-on libraries.
http://herbier.spip.net/?lang=en provides a list of all declared SPIP sites on the internet - some of them are pretty cool ...

For the best multi-lingual modular FREE system, use http://www.spip.net/.
It's basically mandatory for French public institutions, but it still works brilliantly when you power it up in English. Or any other common language.
The support community is naturally mostly French, but I found the English crowd to be very enthusiastic and helpful too.
Almost all of the documentation is translated into English, German, Spanish, Esperanto, etc etc - this makes it really easy to find support staff.
There are multiple template systems ready to go.
And it's written in PHP5, so you can easily add or tweak whatever you want.
Have a look at http://contrib.spip.net/?lang=en for the most common add-on libraries.
http://herbier.spip.net/?lang=en provides a list of all declared SPIP sites on the internet - some of them are pretty cool ...

I plug for SPIP ... http://www.spip.net/.
Create page generation/caching.
Easy user interface.
Loads of templating options (I ran with SARKA).
But it helps if you know French - most of the documentation is translated in English, and there are support forums to match.
But most users are French-speaking. ... and it's free and free.

I worked a bit with Drupal and found it horrible. Now using SPIP with satisfaction.

But most people who have tried it have fought their way through one chapter before coming to the conclusion that it's a load of unintelligible, over-engineered, pretentious crap

As someone who gave a try to Drupal, I would mod you up 'informative".

This thing is fine if you want to do a community website. If you are looking to customize it for something else, you will suffer. And you will never upgrade because you fear everything will colapse. We now use SPIP with much more satisfaction.

My experience with Drupal is that it is fast and easy to setup a web 2.0 site with all the community stuff. However things are getting much more troublesome when one want to customize things. And once you have it done, you fear to upgrade to new versions because it may break everything. Your mileage may vary, and perhaps I did not have a look to the right documentation, but this is how it went for me.

I am now a happy SPIP user.

A very good CMS primarily designed for online newspapers, which evolved to a pretty useful general CMS, and deserves more visibility : SPIP.

Primary site is French, I actually don't know whether the English site link above provides as much information as the fr one.

Yes, Bricolage is an excellent CMS for news organizations (NO's, e.g., newspapers or magazines), but it has a well deserved reputation for being difficult to install, even on Debian, where an un-official Debian package is available to help ease the process. Even Bricolage's chief architect, David Wheeler, concedes this point.

The poster might be better off with SPIP, which is (I understand) equally powerful and possibly easier to install. One caveat with respect to SPIP is that, at one point, its interface and some of its documentation was mostly in French, but that may have changed by now. Otherwise, SPIP enjoys an excellent reputation.

Other CMS's that are designed for specifically for NO's include Cofax and Props, both of which have reputations for being immature as compared to Bricolage and SPIP.

Finally, this issue was discussed here on Slashdot about 17 months ago in a story whose title was "A College Online Newspaper Suite as Open Source?" Another relevant discussion took place on OpenSourceCMS.com just three months ago.

There [are] way too many content management systems out there that focus too much on the content [sic; "community"] aspect. I found it hard to locate [a high] quality, open source CMS that wasn't trying to be Slashdot-like. Many people just want some[thing] for easily organizing lots of pages in a quick and easy manner.

I am going to assume that you meant to write "community" rather than "content" in the quoted text. If so, then I agree with your comment, and have elaborated on this issue before. There is a difference between CMS software and "community-ware" (CW), which is software that is designed to facilitate the building of an Internet community. The software that you lament is what I would call hybrid software, software that is one-half CMS and one-half CW. Such hybrids are often failures. They are neither good CMS's nor good CW. Examples of hybrids would be all of the 'nukes, including PostNuke, Xaraya, and Xoops. Drupal may also fall into the hybrid category.

Why do so many people misuse the label "CMS" to describe such hybrids? I do not know, but I suspect that it is because they have never used a true CMS, such as OpenCMS, Plone, or SPIP.