A lot of cms questions - please help

Apologies for this long post but I need to explain as much as I can.

If anyone is kind enough to read my entire post any help or advice you could offer would be greatly appreciated.
I've never been any good at php so please excuse me if any of the following sounds very basic.

I'm looking to build a website which I can post my own articles to. To begin with, there will be about 160 articles on the site. In the past I have just placed all html pages up, with no backend script. This was fine for
sites that started small and then worked their way upto about 100 pages or so
(although not easy I could manage to edit all the html a page at a time). As I'm starting with somewhere between 160 - 200 pages
and will then be expanding from there I really think I need a decent cms so I can manage the site.

The features I need for the cms include the following:

Static homepage which can display the most recent article posted and a list of categories in a navigation bar,
Ability to create article categories to be displayed in a navigation bar,
Ability to edit the template of each category I create (I would like to include some introductory text explaining what the articles in that particular category will contain and maybe some photos and ads in the category index as well)
Ability to post articles to multiple categories,
Ability to write discriptive text about the article which will display in the article category index. I would like to be able to write different descriptions for the same article depending on the category index it is listed in,
Ability to edit the article title, description, and keyword meta tags, and to define the url and h1 titles - ie. I would like the page title, the article title (that appears in the page content) and the url to all be different,
Allow users to easily bookmark an article with del.icio.us, furl, Y MyWeb, etc.
Allow users to post comments on an article,
Ability to arrange articles in a hierarchy in each category,
Ability to add include files into the article content.
A page of all the categories I create,
A site-wide keyword search,
Ability to arrange articles by tags - multiple tags for the same article,
A mini tag cloud to display popular tags to users in the navigation bar,
A full tag cloud containing all the article tags.


As I am a php novice, I'd like to know is all of the above possible?
Are there any scripts that currently offer some of the above features (as many as possible) that with a little extra work the rest of the features could be added on (trying to keep my costs down).

I'm guessing that a custom cms would be best for this job, but how much should I be paying a freelancer for something like that? I know that the cost of freelance services vary greatly, but can you give me a price range? - minimum and maximum I should expect to pay?
I'm not looking for people to work for me right now, I would just like to know whether such a project is within my budget, and to make sure that if I do go ahead with the project I don't get ripped off or pay peanuts and get all the associated problems that accompany paying too little (e.g. not getting the job done),

I have been looking into using wordpress as a cms as it is a program that I have at least a little bit of experience with and one that with my level of experience I can easily use to publish articles and I know it has the category system and comments and can have the tag system and social bookmarking facilities I require. But how sensible is it to get a coder to add all the other features I require? Although the hierarchy of the articles isn't too important to me and I could easily publish in a reverse chronological order, would it still be better to just get a custom cms built? I'm thinking about the stability of the script and the difference in price in particular here.

I would also need a blog for the site, which I would run in wordpress, but I would like to integrate within the site. I would want all of the website navigation elements to remain on the page and for the blog to look similar to the rest of the site. In addition I would like to include the wordpress navigation, and the wordpress posts on the same page. Is this possible?

Thanks in advance!
John

 

Sorry not going to delve into anything but figured I'd try to help you get started...

First, wordpress has many plugins that would do some/most of the things you want above (just start looking throught them)... Also heres an interesting little js i found that adds pages to social bookmarking sites...
http://www.addtobookmarks.com/

Althought I couldn't solve everything hopefully I gave you a little direction.

 

To get all the features in one CMS that too an opensource one is going to be highly difficult, the most popular CMS like Joomla , Drupal will not make navigational links automatically, you will have to indicate that an menu item is to made eveytime you create an article.

Your needs are more of a blogging site and mostly web 2.0 features, I think wordpress is a good option to it. If you need extended functionality try using JD wordpress with Joomla.

 

Thanks for the replies. I'm looking into having the cms custom made.