Looking for a CMS with a Template and Content Element-System like Typo3 and Concrete5 : <p>Community!</p>

<p>I know, these questions shouldn't be opinion-based and I'm certainly not asking "What's the best CMS???". I'm just at a point of having tried out so many different CMS that I want to know if there does exist one which meets the following criteria:</p>

<h2>Very flexible template system, content elements, content columns</h2>

<p><strong>I don't really like the complexity of designing with Fluid in TYPO3</strong>. I'm not a complete newbie in this area but it strikes me as being pretty complex, you have to know all these functions and knowledge in TypoScript doesn't have much use outside of TYPO3.</p>

<p><strong>On the other hand, I feel the templating is with Fluid is done pretty well</strong>. You have your backend layouts where you define your content columns (name and number), where in your fluid layouts you specify which content column (here, the number is used) is rendered where. Inside the backend you apply your backend layout to your root page (it is inherited which I love because it makes changes easier than having to change the template of every single page!) and you can add your content to the column defined in this backend layout. I love this idea!</p>

<p><strong>The point I like</strong> is that content can exist outside this structure - you can create a content element and have it just not being rendered because it has no layout column specified. Also if you ever want to change your layout, you can do so by provoding the same column numbers in a new backend layout. The name of the columns can be changed without problems - that's the problem with Concrete5.</p>

<p><strong>In Concrete5</strong>, all content resided inside of the "areas" (quasi content columns) on the individual pages. But because Concrete5 has only inline-editing, you can't just change your area names (and they're visible for your editors so maybe you want to change them to a better name, even though there are some standards like 'main' this doesn't fit for Non-English speaking people who just edit content in their language). If you do, you can't access your content inside these areas anymore because it is coupled with the area names (I wonder why there's no ID-system and just a public visibly area name).</p>

<p><strong>Another point is crappy code</strong> - I really don't like the output of some CMS very much, even if you can control it somehow, sometimes there are things like many lines of whitespace - really weird. Concrete5's inline-editing-feature is pretty cool, especially the ability to work with Bootstrap and visually layout your blocks to have two thirds to one third width or something like that. But on the other hand you have to have these header- and footer-includes to use Concrete5, so you HAVE to change the output on your site and have to use the div-wrapper to use inline-editing. I don't really have anything against it as long as it doesn't clutter the final output too much (and I think, Concrete5 is pretty ok in this regard).</p>

<p><strong>I LOVE ModX in this regard</strong> because after experimenting just a little bit I actually got ONLY my html and the things I put in the page editor in the final source code. <strong>The problem with ModX is</strong>: there are no content elements/blocks, there are no content columns/areas - all you have is one big editor field. I know, you can adjust that pretty heavily, but in the end as far as I think it's not really meant to offer you the ability to define multiple areas where you can put different kind of elements inside, is it? Like "Header", "Text &amp; Media" or "Slider" in TYPO3/Concrete5, which you can hide (at least in TYPO3) and move on their own.</p>

<p>(And if there is some good kind of version control, that would be great as well, but that's just a thing I like in TYPO3 and I don't like that much in Concrete5 because you can't really roll back changes to individual elements, just to the whole site - and you can't hide part of your content (hide some blocks like you hide content elements in TYPO3) to "save" an alternative version of, say, a header or a normal text element.)</p>

<hr>

<p><strong>Long story short</strong>, I'm looking for a <em>very flexible template system</em> which let's me design the way I want. It should have <em>individual content elements</em> (elements of different types, which I can create on my own as well) and <em>content areas</em> (/columns), so that I can place my content in different places which I can style individually. It should output only my code if possible (like ModX) and be open to changes (like renaming content columns/areas).</p>

<p>Just to recap my problems I have with the named CMS:</p>

<ul>
<li>TYPO3: too complex to enjoy layouting with Fluid in my regard</li>
<li>Concrete5: too tightly coupled (content is gone when you rename the
areas in your layout, you can't access it anymore at all)</li>
<li>ModX: Not
really built for multiple content elements which reside in multiple
content columns</li>
</ul>

<p>To not counteract the purpose of stackoverflow, I want to clarify that I'm not looking for every CMS in which the named things are POSSIBLE. Someone might say "You can totally do that in Drupal, just install these 200 modules and you're good to go!") but are actually intended (like content columns and content elements in TYPO3/Concrete5, especially in Concrete5 it feels very natural to work that way, you don't get a sense of having to hack the system for days just to have a good base for developing your site.</p>

<p>I'm asking if there's a CMS available (it should be open-source/free) that actually supports these developing principles by it's nature. I hope you can help me and everyone looking for a CMS which supports this style of working! Thank you! :)</p>
