I'm planning to release ETP by the end of the month as an OpenACS4 package. It's a user interface for the content repository data model, and lets you do the kinds of CMS tasks you mentioned with a minimum of fuss. For the programmer, there's an tcl api for defining content types and associating them with page templates. For the content editor, there's an interface for adding, editing, and categorizing pages on the site.
Although I have some work to do before ETP is ready for others to use, you could make preliminary versions of your page templates right now, which is where the bulk of the implementation work always lies.
Make sure you've read the ACS templating documentation
(http://developer.arsdigita.com/doc/acs-templating/
)
, and then design your master template and a template for each of your content types. A template that displays a single object should rely on a "onerow" data source (which is just a tcl array), and a template that lists objects of a particular type should rely on a "multirow" data source (which you can create with the template::multirow api). When ETP becomes available, it will be easy for you to make these templates present dynamic information from the content repository instead.
