And there many CMSes that are overkill for the purpose of making a news/articles site. Try and find a light-weight one, perhaps even one that will need some additional coding to put to work. If you want to code from scratch, please do use a framework to make things easier on you. I kind of like Code Igniter myself, I've been using it for a new JCSRef and it makes coding a content management site just that more easy. In fact, if you haven't found a CMS or a coder in a while, I'm willing to share the JCSRef code since both sites probably have a lot of the same needs. (I'd be willing to share it now but there's not much to share yet as things are still in progress).

Focus on coders/CMS for now, though.