CMS or bespoke?

[booger]

I'm at the start of a redesign of a website that, amongst other things, presents data from a database of properties.  It has been built with PHP, XHTML and CSS, but there are many aspects of the site I am unhappy with.

Despite having looked at various CMS' I can't determine whether or not I can search and present data from my property database within a CMS such as CMS Made Simple.  I am proficient in PHP, (X)HTML and CSS and want to produce a site that is visually appealing as well as accessible.

Is it worthwhile investing time in getting to grips with CMS Made Simple - will it enable me to deliver the solution I am after?

Any thoughts, ideas or comments welcome.

[tsw]

cant say much about bespoke as I havent used it myself

but as for cmsms on a website, it just works. and if you need to get some data from other db thats easy too (wiki has some examples) or you could even create your own module to show the data.

templates are fully modifiable and you can do just about anything with them (its just xhtml plus some smarty tags to get the dynamic content in place) css is used to style everything.

hope this helps

[booger]

Thanks tsw,

You've clarified that for me, I will spend some time getting to grips with CMSMS.  From what I've seen playing around with it so far it does look for flexible, now that I know I can expand it to easily incorporate existing databases, it sounds ideal for what I need.

Cheers