Drupal is getting better & is one of the best options for open source content & ecommerce on the market.
I think BuiltWith will do this for you. Plug in the domain and it will tell you which technologies it is built on. Most of the well-known video sites are custom jobs, but I'm sure WP could do what you want.
Personally I'd: - Crawl the existing site - save to Excel - Run a search in Google for: site:domain.com Then export the list (use Chrome SEO quake extension) and add to Excel Put both lists into 1 Excel file & de-duplicate. Next, get the sitemap of your new site, so you have all the URLs. T...
I've been down this road before (two custom CMS platforms built over the years), and to play devil's advocate here: do you really need to build a custom CMS? What problem are you up against that aren't being solved by existing solutions? If those problems aren't fundamental, how much time and mo...
For the design? The downside is that you could end up with a very generic looking application/site. It's also not your (or your developer's) code so there will usually be a period of time required to get used to it in order to make any adjustments. In the end, it may not really save you that muc...