I've installed and used Drupal and Joomla; never built a CMS from scratch. I'm forced to use Sharepoint Designer at work. I still prefer Wordpress; to each his own I suppose. It's all about what you're comfortable with. It is a bit overwhelming at first, but there is a lot of configuration options you can implement very quickly and easily once you have it setup and going. I'm glad you got your MAMP install done. Were you able to login to the CMS?