Have finally come to the realisation that I might actually have to pay for a CMS.  First time for everything.

The sort of functions I’m looking for just don’t appear to be available in the open source community.

To that end I have found one that seems reasonably priced and fits the bill with a very impressive feature set, including some things that I never expected to find but will no doubt at some point in the future, such as the ability to deploy an application across multiple servers in a server-farm setup.

The CMS is called kentico (not sure how it’s pronounced).

Things I like:

• Uses asp.net standard functions to build page templates, so things like master pages etc are available
• Has extensive documentation
• Great easy to use interface
• Publishing mechanism, so that I can actually build the site at home off a local server and then publish over a web service the actually updates to the site/database
• MS SQL server 2000 support
• An excellent tool to add new document types, with attributes, that you can then map transformations to.  This means you can effectively build structured content items and then have them displayed and re-used over and over again.
• Extensive set of built in functions and controls for use when building page templates
• Granular security model
• Cheap(ish)

Have been playing with this for 2 nights now and it seems excellent.  Have put something on their forum, will see how the support is.

UPDATE: We bought Kentico to host newagestore.com about 3 years ago.  Very happy with the result.