CMS Made Simple Forums

Don't know if this is actually the right area to be asking this (man this board is bit confusing!) but here goes:

I'm a designer/developer with a fairly long experience producing websites. Typically I create the design elements from scratch, script my own CSS, HTML, and structure my websites with my own simple PHP (and sometimes mySQL) backend.

However, I'm curious about the possible benefits of using something like CMSMS to enable end users to manage their own websites in some small way. The add-ons don't interest me so much (although the shopping cart idea would be a major feature IMHO) but I'm interested to know how much control the developer has over the core framework. ie:

1. Can the developer affect *every* CSS attribute and HTML tag behavior, or this is a WYSIWYG deal?
2. Can CMSMS handle templates that are radically different from the standard 1-, 2-, or 3-column layouts? (I'm guessing these are header/footer structures right now, but can it handle anything?)
3. Can the developer use separate technologies like jQuery and home-brew AJAX functionality easily within this framework?
4. Can the developer add home-brew PHP/mySQL functionality on a per-page basis, or is everything reliant on pre-set templates?

Very interested in what other designers/developers might have to say on this.

Thanks in advance!

1. Can the developer affect *every* CSS attribute and HTML tag behavior, or this is a WYSIWYG deal?

for pages, yes.... you have complete control over the layout, styles, and tags used.  for forms some modules make it a bit difficult to effect the behaviour.... but you can simply wrap the form in a div, and then style it any way you want, or use jquery.

2. Can CMSMS handle templates that are radically different from the standard 1-, 2-, or 3-column layouts? (I'm guessing these are header/footer structures right now, but can it handle anything?)

CMSMS makes no assumptions and takes no control over your layout... everything is done with templates. 

3. Can the developer use separate technologies like jQuery and home-brew AJAX functionality easily within this framework?

Sure.... you have complete control of your site.

4. Can the developer add home-brew PHP/mySQL functionality on a per-page basis, or is everything reliant on pre-set templates?

You can include php with user defined tags (UDT's) quite easily.  There's an extensive module api for writing new functionality, smarty is easy to extend... the possibilities are limitless.