Content-Rich site needs good CMS

[Andreas]

Hello everyone!

I am currently in the process of building a new website, and I was wondering if any of you fine people had some answers to my questions. Primarily content-focused, I need a good system in place to organize and aggregate various types of files such as: desktop backgrounds, photos, quicktime VR 3D scenes, script, and more. In the past, I'd used vanilla HTML to publish my content to the web, but now that I'm doing a complete redesign I'd like to use a more flexible system. In case you hadn't realized, plain HTML doesn't exactly provide the easiest way to add new content.

For the site journal, I've chosen Wordpress since it seems to be the best blogging system out there, and I like how it works. I've been considering incorporating more images into the entries, sort of an illuminated blog. How easy and flexible is this in WP?


But articles aren't the only kind of content I'd like to put up.

First, I'd like to put up a good deal of the photos I've taken over the years. People are always asking me if I can email them photos I take at events. Being able to point them to an all-encompassing gallery would be great. (In fact, I'd like full-resolution or near full-resolution images so people would be able to print them out.) However, another passion of mine has been creating desktop backgrounds out of 3D scenes I've built, and since these are also 2D images, they ought to be in the gallery as well. (A great feature of this gallery would be the ability to resize huge source images into 10 smaller versions to fit on smaller screens so I wouldn't have to resize them myself.)

I also have content that I don't think a gallery could handle. I'd like an intuitive way to organize various non-jpeg files such as scripts or 3D objects. These would be downloadable ZIP files. And, as with all galleries, I'd like each item to have the ability to be rated 1-5 stars and list the number of downloads.




So that's a start. Is there an elegant way to integrate Wordpress with a gallery system? Should I use a CMS? How much of this content could Wordpress handle? Is there a flexible CMS that would elegantly fulfill these requirements yet not seem awkward? (That's a whole separate topic, I'm sure.) Is there a gallery that can manage just ZIP files?

At this point, I know exactly what I want the site to have on it, indeed much of the content is already created, I just need help choosing the means. Thanks for all of your help, I really appreciate it.