Out of Yahoo we have a strong opinion, although Nicole seems to have got there from a different starting point from us (strictly CSS maintainability) the conclusions are almost identical. (She also has a potentially useful toolkit on github

This is an area that I will be coming back to quite a bit over the next few months. The key points from the design point of view are modularity and reusability (and grids, the technology that helps these parts be reusable while still making a coherent whole). From the technical point of view a templating structure that encourages recursive modular thinking is needed (in MySource Matrix, the Squiz CMS these are encapsulated through paint layouts).

Page based design is weak for more complex content management problems. It works quite well for some things – a Wordpress blog like this for example, but not an enterprise content management system, where content reuse is a key requirement.