What are some flexible, free CMS's for written in PHP for large websites?

Question

I'm looking for a content management system (CMS) written in PHP for a large and diverse website. Here's what I'm looking for:

• Design flexibility -- The look and feel needs to be completely customizable. Specific pages may need to have design elements
• Modular design -- I want to be able to add features myself if they're needed.
• Production ready
• Advanced user permissions
• MySQL or Oracle

What I can sacrifice:

• Steep learning curve -- I am experienced PHP and RoR developer. I'm alright with needing to take a few days/weeks to learn it.
• Performance -- we don't get much traffic.
• SEO -- This is on a local intranet, no need for SEO. Pretty URLs are nice, but not required.

If there isn't a CMS that meets these needs, my last option would be to build one from scratch using Kohana 3.0, which I'm already using on a daily basis.

Background: At my place of work we're looking to redesign/develop our existing website hosted on a local network. This site consists of somewhere between 600-1,000 static HTML pages, many of which contain varying design elements (like jQuery tabs). Though the site is pretty big, we probably only get around 100 hits per day. There will be customers (no coding experience) and fellow web-developers modifying the content on these pages.

Answer 1

I would say the usual suspects Joomla and Drupal. Added benefit of huge communities.

Answer 2

I have had good experience with Etomite

It allows you to plug-in PHP code easily, it has nice template structure as well as static (Chunks) and dynamic (Snippets) modules that can easily be added to any page or template. I also found it had a good security structure. It probably does not have such a large community but the support forums are sufficiently active.

Answer 3

http://modxcms.com/ -> modx modx modx an etomite fork

Modx's REVO release is OOP, but might not be release ready, but the EVO release is tested and true :)

it's great for modular design, design flexibility and above all extensibility. Especially given that you are willing to go through a bit of a steeper learning curve, with some php knowledge you'll be able to get a lot out of modx. Using the "usual suspects" can be limiting in the areas of extensibility, where though it is possible, but everything can feel like a hack.