A Designers Dream CMS

[eluser]Nick Husher[/eluser]
I've written two basic CMSes in the past. One of them was a dedicated project from a small software company, and I realized this about content management systems as a species: They're impossible to do well and very easy to do badly. I've come to the conclusion that it's better to find two or three CMSes that do different kinds of things and get really good at them, warts and all, before diving into your own CMS project.

That said, if you're really interested in making a CMS, I'd suggest that you work on making it do one thing really really well. That thing being manage content. Not users, permissions, or fancy assets. Just content, just text and images. Figure out the rest after you know exactly how to store, index, and manipulate volumes of text. It's a lot harder than it looks.