What is a good CMS system that I can get my site up and running quick as well that will let me write my own code for it down the line without any hassle? And will also let me add my own customized pages that I have already written.
A major site. If i can add ratings, articles, members, and much more.
I use movable type (http://www.movabletype.org/) for smaller, basic sites of 1 - 50 pages. It's very useful where the client isn't very web-savvy and want's somthing that they can update quickly without learning too much. It's also very handy where cheap web hosting is being employed and you don't have a powerful/consistant/available mySQL database
For larger projects Joomla (http://www.joomla.org/), Mambo (http://mambo-foundation.org/), or Drupal (http://www.drupal.org.uk/).
I'm getting asked to build sites in these three for government and commercial organisations more and more often. My personal preference is for Drupal, IMHO it's easier to get to grips with quickly compared to Joomla and Mambo.
On about the same level as movable type, wordpress can be used as a cms. Wordpress + WP-CMS + WP-PageNavi makes a spiffy little cms.
Wordpress tends to be hassel free for the customer in the sense that the modules and core software can update themselves. Its also relatively easy to make a theme for, and create modules.
The other thing about wordpress is it has plug-ins for everything.
For example: You were looking for something with page ratings? Try WP-PostRatings.
If that doesn't do it for you, try drupal or expression engine. These are larger, feature-complete cms systems.
I looked at SilverStripe and concrete5 a couple of months ago and both seemed to be good, lightweight CMS applications. SilverStripe has the bonus of being based on an extensible framework (Sapphire) which it exposes to the developer.
I'm currently reviewing packages for my work and am looking at cms made simple (CMSMS) - http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ currently. It's the first of 3 packages i am reviewing. We use SilverStripe and even though it work for out implementation, I've been more impressed CMSMS. I've been looking at it for just a couple of days, easily installed and have been making progress on converting a portion of one of our sites to see how it goes. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts as I work with this one and others over the next few days. But worth at least looking at.
I also used this web site - http://www.opensourcecms.com/ to find candidates to review. I know there are places that do reviews, this is just one that I used. It has hundreds of packages in varying degrees and have demos set up for the ones that does not host their own demo. Also good reviews of each package.
I have used ModX in many projects, i find the ability to easily hook into the API and write snippets very useful indeed.
Modx requires some learning but its not particulaly difficult and it is incredibly flexible for a CMS. You can create pretty much any type of site with it.
There are various content management systems for various instances. This is like asking, "Which is the best car?" It's a question of opinion and is subjective, as opposed to a problem with a definitive answer.