I know this might not be ideal for your purposes as any non-standard custom functionality requires a bit of a learning curve, and this particular CMS tries to be as lightweight as possible by design, so it lacks some of the more advanced features of the better known mainstream CMS's, but I've developed a website with CMS Made Simple (cmsmadesimple.org) pretty quickly and easily.
This website uses a contact form, an automatically updating copyright notice, a dynamic news page where you can filter the news to display only entries from a particular category (general, social events, site updates, etc), it has a built-in search module, the capability to print the current page directly or to share it via e-mail or on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, and a custom made photo gallery with alt descriptions.
The things I had to do from scratch were the contact form and the gallery. There is a third party plugin called Form Builder available for this CMS which is also pretty accessible and advanced but it just didn't suit my needs. I wanted modern HTML5 elements with ARIA alerts in the form, which would be a pain to set up with the way the plugin is designed, as well as additional server-side validation in PHP in case the user either disables or works around the Javascript in their client, plus very primitive custom logging about sent messages that is stored on the server. All of this was written in pure HTML5, Javascript and PHP manually. It's very easy to insert custom pieces of PHP code, which are called tags in this CMS.
The news, search and printing modules are preincluded in the CMS core, so they only needed a bit of customization, there is an easily available RSS module in the central plugin repository which is reachable from within the admin pannel, and it's pretty easy and flexible to create your site template and CSS skin. Unfortunately, the site is in Czech only, so it would probably be useless for you to take a look at it.
The only other CMS I've had any previous experience with is WordPress but I just didn't like that one all that much. It tends to be slow and bulky, not to mention that it gets targeted with various hacks and attacks pretty much all the time because of how widely used and popular it is, and because of its relative feature complexity, it can sometimes become unnecessarily tedious to set up something small and simple through its admin interface.
Through customizing the CMS's internal config.php as well as the standard .htaccess file, you can achieve quite a lot of relatively advanced stuff, such as having the admin pannel and the contact form automatically use SSL as long as HTTPS is enabled for your webhosting, etc.
So, although my tip might not be what you are looking for, it's unfortunately the only recommendation I can provide so far. :-D
Hope this helps,
Lukas
I won't be using this account any more or participating in the forum activity through other childish means like creating an alternate account. I've asked for the account to be removed but I'm not sure if that's actually technically possible here. Just writing this for people to know that I won't be replying, posting new topics or checking private messages until the account is potentially removed.
