the company i work for is using a very slow, very antiquated content management system, and we'd like to switch over to something faster and more stable. the reason our current system is so slow is that:

• it uses unindexed flat file databases (ugh)
• it parses EVERY non-binary file before serving it via http (think server-side includes, but much much worse)
• its just old. the company that developed it went under in 1998, for godsake, so it hasnt been revised since then.

now, the system uses several flatfile databases:

catalog
- contains a record for every unique product (ex: upc, name, price)

transactions
- contains a record for every transaction (ex: product, transaction id, quantity)

customers
- contains a record for every company that purchases from us (ex: company id, name, address)

news
- contains a record for every 'news' story on our external site, publicly available (ex: story date, title, byline, content)

photos
- contains a record for every photograph in our online photo galleries, also publicly available (ex: photo id, category, filename)

on our internal sites, we use all but the last two. we allow customers to view our product catalog so they can place orders. we fluctuate our inventory by adding or subtracting quantities in transactions.

on our external public site, we have company and industry news, we have several company photo galleries. we also allow anyone to search our product catalog for general product info, seeing as how our product is publicly available through distributors.

now, both the internal and external sites are dynamic content. the individual pages are generated on-the-fly from templates.

i figured we could do something pretty much the same with mysql, but it would all be indexed and cross-referenced in several tables, all within one database. and we could do all our templating and dynamic content via perl or php or any other server-side scripting languages. i don't, however, want to spend months developing a cms from scratch, especially if we can find a suitable one that already exists and is maintained.

since i know perl better than any other language, i'd like to find one that is either written in, or utilizes perl. (mabye written in c, for speed?) does anyone know of a cms suitable for what we need?