I've always "rolled my own" when doing any kind of web design. My last two major projects were a trouble ticket database and a very unique school closings listing database for the radio station. The latter was pretty complex with a nice smooth, easy to use GUI so that the newsroom people can bring up and enter the data quickly as a the calls came in during a blizzard (hundreds of calls per hour, literally!). There was a lot more to it but I won't get into that.
Anyway, I've always prided myself on doing everything from scratch, HTML/DHTML, Javascript, CSS, SQL queries, graphics, everything. Recently I've started working on another project and wonder if a Content Management System (like Joomla) would make things easier for the front end. It's always the GUI that takes me a long time to get right. Silly browsers and their quirks and not conforming to standards *cough* IE *cough*. The backend stuff is easy.
So anyway, I checked out Joomla yesterday and it's OK. A lot of people rave about it but I think it's kinda slow and it's also not very friendly toward doing a purely custom SQL integration of forms and data display. There's plugins for it, which I tried a couple. Fabrik is cumbersome yet powerful. It also requires a lot of coding to do what I want to do. I also don't want my projects' GUI to look cookie cutter, which requires more HTML/CSS coding along with the SQL queries I'm going to have to build. So I'm kinda thinking I'd rather just build my own from scratch like I always do, which will ultimately be more efficient and I KNOW what's under the hood and can fix it easily.
Any thoughts? Anyone else do this sort of thing? What do you recommend?