What is the best CMS for creative design?

Wordpress. Oh, wait.

Oh, nevermind.

I guess it's not that I don't want to.. it's more of I don't know anything about PHP. I'm just getting to the point where I feel confident with my HTML and CSS, so I'd like to start learning PHP next.

The site I want to integrate a CMS for is currently on my test domain - http://aisf.digital-tap.com/

My biggest problem with WordPress is I just don't know where to get to started. I've read over their documentation on developing themes, but like I said I'm not at a point where I can just throw some PHP together then add my HTML and CSS to customize it.

Do you know if there are any plain templates specifically for that purpose? If all I needed to do was add my own CSS and modify the HTML I think I could use WordPress.

Thanks for the help!

You're making difficulties for yourself. All CMS of note use PHP or another scripting language the question is which of them requires you to get involved at that level the least? WordPress is insanely easy to theme, too easy imho and is part of the reason there are so many god awful badly conceived themes available - there are also some really excellent ones too!.

With WP you do not need to throw some php together, you do not really need any php skills, it's all about child theming at the most basic level and a child theme can be as simple as just a directory in which you place a single file 'style.css'

Your last question suggests that you probably have not yet grasped some basic concepts of WP theming and you must go back over and over the WP codex pages related to design and theming (ignore anything else for the moment)

Start of by creating a child theme of Twentyten default WP theme follow the guidelines on the WP codex for creating a child theme - note! how the template hierarchy works (again it's insanely simple).

Sadly as with most things there is a learning curve and there is that point of inertia where you stare at things utterly non plused; you have to accept that and struggle on, you are learning and that does not come overnight, there are no shortcuts, and eventually you must learn sufficient php and markup skills if you want to master something like WP to any great degree, having said that though, one heck of a lot of WP at many levels is simply copy 'n' paste from examples *he sighed*

Yea - It's definitely a learning process and the toughest part is always figuring out where to get started. Thanks for the advice. I'll see what I can do with developing a basic child theme.

I find that wordpress 3 with the "Weaver" theme makes it even more insanely easy than it otherwise is. It even produces valid html! I've done three sites with it lately and you can knock a simple one up in an hour or two. Before I found Weaver I was about to give up on Wordpress which I didn't find easy at all to write themes for.

You don't need to know any PHP to use ExpressionEngine. A little bit helps, but it's in no way necessary. On the other hand, you do need to learn ExpressionEngine's templating language instead but that's a trade-off you simply can't avoid. You either learn PHP or you learn a templating language like Smarty or a proprietary one like used in ExpressionEngine, ModX etc.