I'm setting up a site aimsed at a niche market and I want to offer them hosting as well as a simple way to setup their site as the market is generally not tech-savvy. I know PHP, mySQL, whatever else so I have the technical knowledge to go a number of different routes.

Basically all their sites are going to require is a choice of several templates, the ability to customize the menu, and then 4-5 pages per site, one of which will require me to interface with PHP and mySQL to display a list of items that they should be able to continually add to in some sort of web interface, designed by me or not it doesn't matter.

I'm currently fooling around with Joomla, but I'm not sure how I would want to interface with it. I think Joomla might be my best choice, and while most of the Joomla features would go un-used it would work and allow my clients to change templates easily.

Are there any other template systems out there that I should check out? My reservation with Joomla is I don't want my clients to be overwhelmed with the options a Joomla admin has, really they only have 4-5 pages and I want things to be as simple as possible. Any other suggestions?

If I could find a barebones templating system, I can program the back-end myself pretty easily, I just don't want to fool around with writing a template system and I'm not the best with CSS.

something like www.designload.net ?
www.freesitetemplates.com
www.templatemonster.com

I'm more looking for an all-encompassing template management software that I can also integrate custom code into. Like when they sign-up on my site, I want it to be fully automated to the point where they can setup their site right then and there: select a template, paste in your text and you're good to go! There is one page that will need WYSIWYG editing, or if possible something that can convert a Word doc to HTML or something.

I'm probably going to go with PowerVPS and am curious as to some of the features of Fantastico DeLuxe, such as the following:

Portals/CMS:
Drupal
Geeklog
Mambo Open Source
PHP-Nuke
phpWCMS
phpWebSite
Post-Nuke
Siteframe
Typo3
Xoops

Site Builders:
Soholaunch Pro Edition
Templates Express

Are any of these going to be good for what I'm trying to do? I guess I could just purchase the VPS and test it on my own, but I want to make sure I want the cPanel package before I purchase anything.

Anyone got any info on this one?

Fantastico deluxe is just a collection of scripts which are basically 'pre installed' if you would like to see what the scripts you have listed do (since I cant be bothered to explain them all), I'll set you up with a cPanel webhosting account for a few hours to tinker with those scripts and see if its what you require or not.

If you're interested shoot me a PM or add me via messenger
Yahoo: AlwaysHosted
MSN: support@alwayshosted.com

NOTE: I do not offer reseller or vps hosting, so this is not a sales grab attempt. :)