Simple CMS

DragoniteBallZ have you tried PyroCMS? I recommend looking at Smarty Template Engine as well, you easily create your own MiniCMS and use Smarty to help with the front end design.

Well Smarty will at most help you to make your code comply to the MVC paradigm. You would still need to write all your HTML by hand and incorporate all your own server side code by hand.

For what I know, MiniCMS will only give you a web app to WYSIWYG your websites. It won't give you blog and gallery tools. I'm not sure of PyroCMS since I never looked into it, but it isn't Smarty friendly.

DragoniteBallZ

At work we use Perch, it isn't free but it's very powerful and user friendly, you simply add a small PHP function (perch_content()) wherever you want to be able to change the content, you can easily make blogs and galleries by using some add ons or by creating your own custom content areas, it's just a one time payment as well so it's not like you have to pay monthly like with some CMSs.

I highly recommend it.

I think you'll be hard pushed to find a free CMS that's going to let you do everything you need... You can pay for Perch using $, it's an English company so they just show £ as default.

All I need is a blog or some type of news feed and a image gallery!

quote Redemption

Wouldn't Wordpress be your best bet if that's all you need?

Thing is Wordpress, like Drupal and Joomla uses it's own structure. And I know you can modify them. I want to use my own web structure and design and just plug in what I need. Similar to Newspro back in the CGI days. Reason I dont like using Drupal or Wordpress is because I dont want to take time studying, working around, tearing down and just reversing their structure and code. I want to use my own and have pluggable scripts instead.

quote Redemption

Hmm... realistically I always find its a fight between your own structure or someone elses, with the tradeoff being flexibility (your own structure) and convenience (having lots of functinality prebuilt). I think WordPress has an advanced enough architecture now to serve as CMS, Blog, and mini database. It's definitely the best blogging platform out of the ones you listed, and as a CMS it is just good enough for 90% of what most people want.

When I stumbled upon PyroCMS the one thing that stood out for me was that it was built on CodeIgniter, so at least its built on a good base.

Yeah but see what if I wanted to change the layout? That is such a hassle to tear down in such complex and strict TR. And I dont want to use someone's premade theme. The people that want to use WordPress want it entirely for the need of a CMS itself and don't mind using any premade theme available. I actually dont need a full CMS I just need an image gallery and like a blog feed or news feed and user profiles attached to both perhaps. That has simple code for me to edit. I am not really good with object oriented or functionality programming. Just design. So another reason why it is sort of difficult for me in a way to work with word press. Trying to figure out what is going on in the back end just melts my brain.