Picking a CMS
As langsor notes above, mod_rewrite has much less impact today on your search results than it used to have. I used MoveableType (which outputs static pages) then switched to a tool that used mod_rewrite and saw my numbers crater. That doesn't seem to happen as much these days.
But this experience has made me very sensitive to how CMS tools output pages. My strong preference is to have static pages. Not just to be 100% sure the pages can be spidered easily but also to ensure my clients "own" their pages on their server. If they want to get rid of me, it's no big deal for them to migrate to another web professional.
What you describe, making global changes across multiple pages, can be done with some HTML editors using regular expression search and replace. HomeSite used to be able to do this, circa 1999. But I would agree that it's ultimately limiting.
So I would look at a number of CMS tools with an eye to how they output pages and if they can output static pages with any file extension you like, for example .html pages or .php or .cfm or .asp pages. That's the holy grail. Moveable Type does this but I suspect there are others, although I have not found many after years of looking at dozens of programs and building a few lightweight ones. And some people hate the wait while the CMS publishes multiple pages.
Good luck.
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