After years of not touching it I made a side with PHP again. It was a difficult delivery but during the process many familiar things surfaced and I learned a lot of new things on my way. I am now looking for an open source CMS which can be used with my own created template (instead of included templates). Of course, I could develop something myself, but why reinvent the wheel when ready-made solutions exist? What would be my best option?
You need to consider what your needs are, eg forum, blog, wiki, etc. If there isn’t a CMS that can do all that you need on it’s own, you could look into two or more that cover your needs and “bridge” them (eg logging into one logs you into the rest). Some CMSs already have plugins available for “bridging” them with other CMSs
Pros:
It’s very intuitive, simple to set up and has an extensive plugin repository.
Cons:
In a word, “Speed”.
Your typical WP site is bogged down with bloated JavaScript files from various plugins and out of the box WP queries a live DB far too often.
You can negate most of this by using something like W3 Total Cache (for example to cache DB queries and concatenate and minify JS).