Recommend a free webpage content-management system (geeky!)

In My Humble Opinion
1

(total geek mode ON)

Just wondering if any of the web-geek-oriented Dopers out there can throw out some recommendations for a free content management system. A brief search of the field turns up hundreds of stuff, way too much for me to sift through, so I thought asking the SDMB hivemind might be a more productive approach.

Currently, I’m looking for something with the following features:
[ul]
[li]Free (natch)[/li][li]Not restricted in page layout/design[/li][li]Works with PHP, JSP, or some other language that works well with HTML[/li][li]Plays nice with CSS[/li][li]Doesn’t require cryptic URLs[/li][li]Doesn’t require extensive SQL expertise[/li][/ul]

Basically, I’m envisioning some sort of CMS that will let me upload/enter content via a web-based interface, where I can then write web pages and scripts to access/manipulate/display that content as I see fit.

I looked briefly at PHP-Nuke, but rejected it because everything is built around the same three-column layout. PHPcms also seems promising, but I don’t know if its lack of a database limits it to text-only content.

But again, I’m barely getting into this area right now; what do you recommend?

2

I tried Drupal for the website of my research group and found myself quite comfortable. You can customize lots of things through the web interface in a simple way, it does play nice with CSS and well, it is open source.

It does restrict you a little when it comes to structure of the web pages, so you might want to have a look at various Drupal-based sites first; they have a set of links on their site that they use as a sort of portfolio.

3

Linux Magazine just redid their entire site using Mambo. I haven’t installed it yet, but looked into it briefly. Looks like a pretty good CMS.

4

I’m using Mambo for a new site still in development. Open source, works with Apache/PHP/MySQL. Looks like you can do a lot to tweak the layout with CSS, but I haven’t gotten into any of that yet.

I briefly tried Sitellite, but the installation seems totally broken. I couldn’t get it to work for more than a couple hours before all the control panel pages started turning into error messages.