sundialsvc4,- thanks for your input. Your advice on designing functionality first is really timely as I was going to plunge into coding without a thorough plan. I am gonna write on up first now.

Like I said in the previous comment, I have used Drupal and WP and what I found is that WP is relatively easy to use but has limited capability and probably isn't the CMS I need for the job. Drupal is versatile and powerful but it is a pain to set up and it has huge overhead on db usage with lots of tables for simply chores and hundreds of db quarries for even very simple operations. I think that Drupal is a pretty clumsy CMS. I haven't tried Joomla, though.

My rationale for using perl is that the site can be made flexible and with just those functions I need, nothing more, nothing less. I will be coding myself with another guy so we'll get a good control of how safe and reliable the site is. My other issue with Drupal was reliability. It did crash several times and I have no idea why. Diagnosing problems and fixing them may really time consuming with Drupal and I don't even want to think about doing it on a live site:)

On the other hand there is the question of reinventing the wheel and I keep on going back to the idea of trying another CMS, like Joomla, say. Did you have any positive experience with any CMS in the past, btw?