The architecture was so convoluted, that I first tried to ignore it. I went crazy downloading extensions with bad descriptions over and over and finding they didn't do what I needed. But besides the days upon days spent messing with extensions, there were two larger annoyances.
First, going nuts with writing templates, modules and components... spending hours digging through documentation to do something I could do outside of Joomla in ten minutes with regular old HTML, CSS, JavaScript or PHP. Once, I literally spent over a week trying to write a form with plain old fields that wrote to a table I defined. That's all. Something that'd take maybe a half hour outside of Joomla, maybe an hour if I was being picky about the styles.
And the second major annoyance was trying to train an end user on the backend... writing gobs of documentation about what they should do, what they shouldn't do, and conducting a 6-hour training, and finding they just call me all the time cause it's too confusing for them. And honestly, it confuses me... if I haven't done a task in Joomla lately, takes all sorts of tiem poking about to figure it out again.
So... last week, I had a meeting with a nonprofit that wants to manage their own web site. And after a year with Joomla, I basically... well, either I found something better, or I just wasn't taking the job unless they were going to be patient enough to let me write my own CMS.
I Googled, I read reviews. I knew my criteria:
1. TinyMCE, with some sort of addition for users to add pages and sections and not much else - cause I like how you can configure TinyMCE and everyone understands it as soon as they look at it.
2. an easy way to write templates - I should be able to take an HTML file and CSS file I wrote myself and stick it in the CMS in 10-15 minutes, tops.
3. A simple way to write my own code without banging my head against someone else's way of thinking. Even a very logical architecture doesn't mean it will fit *me* - I don't want to think like someone else, but like myself.
In my searching, I found CMSMS. I read all the documentation. And then spent 3-4 hours reading the forums. And it sounded like I found my CMS.
So yesterday, I downlaoded it, installed it and read through the sample data. This is MORE than everything I ever wanted in a CMS, all sorts of ltitle annoyances I didn't list were addressed in the sample data.
I have told my husband, I am now officially in love with Ted.
Seriously, when I get the deposit for this job, there's a donation coming your way. And if I keep liking it like this, for every job from here on out.
CMSMS ROCKS! WOOHOO!
Create your design, offline, using "dummy data" where the {tags} would go. When you've finished and tested the design, replace the dummy data with their respective {tags}, fix any file references (images, scripts, etc) to reflect their locations on the server, and then simply copy-n-paste the template and CSS into CMSMS and upload the necessary supporting files/scripts. 
