Joomla or Rails?
flooha: Most experienced admins who have used all of the various php based CMSs would probably recommend Drupal over Joomla.  Drupal is considered better when it comes to security and customization.  Joomla addons have a stigma of being generally insecure.As others have said, you'll get up and running faster with an open-source CMS, but you can get bogged down trying to customize it.  If you're not a designer, you might want to pay for one to customize a template/theme for you.  I can't tell you the number of wasted hours I've spent trying to customize the look of a CMS, but working with CSS and templates just isn't my thing.If you're really into design and it's not a big deal for you then using rails could be a better answer as long as you keep it simple, as you said.  The backend should be pretty straight forward, though you can get bogged down in the details.I'm sending you an email with some additional info.  My startup could help you out, but I'm planning a formal launch next week so I don't want to publicize it here too much.