Rapid Development + Scaling Web

What does everyone use these days for rapid development for the web?

I tend to have strong feelings against wordpress and similar CMS, but end up needing a CMS like features to allow people to post, login, moderate etc.

I'm not stuck with any technology but I know i'm not great on the frontend side, so I'd love to find something that's fast to get something out while not being a nightmare to scale up if we need to down the line (Like Wordpress for example )