In my own experience, using an existing CMS has rarely fulfilled project requirements very well. It's never about just "static pages". You want things like menus and sidebars with specific structure, multi-language support, commenting, search, etc. Then you fight with the existing features and plugins of the CMS and try to bend them to your will.
For instance working with Drupal, my usual procedure was to immediately set up a custom extension, so I could start adding custom features there. I also spent a lot of time learning the filenames of special override templates to use to customize some very small portion of the UI. Sometimes something was impossible without forking an extension or even forking the Drupal core.
Eventually I mostly gave up on the CMS approach and started building websites using frameworks like Rails and Django, which can provide all the features of a CMS as components (gems/apps) which you can use as you wish. I found that this approach almost always suited my development needs much better, because I was no longer "fighting" the CMS.
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In my own experience, using an existing CMS has rarely fulfilled project requirements very well. It's never about just "static pages". You want things like menus and sidebars with specific structure, multi-language support, commenting, search, etc. Then you fight with the existing features and plugins of the CMS and try to bend them to your will.
For instance working with Drupal, my usual procedure was to immediately set up a custom extension, so I could start adding custom features there. I also spent a lot of time learning the filenames of special override templates to use to customize some very small portion of the UI. Sometimes something was impossible without forking an extension or even forking the Drupal core.
Eventually I mostly gave up on the CMS approach and started building websites using frameworks like Rails and Django, which can provide all the features of a CMS as components (gems/apps) which you can use as you wish. I found that this approach almost always suited my development needs much better, because I was no longer "fighting" the CMS.