phpNuke

Just wondering on your opinions of this.

I downloaded it yesterday and I find that it is very hard to make it unique-looking... all phpNuke sites look the same to me, even with the different themes. It is also rather difficult to customize and find its too bloated. What are the alternatives to nuke?

I can program php and perl etc, but my design skills are non-existant. Is it better to redesign everything in nuke, or are there better CMS out there? I basically want a news section, forum, and a few other pages within the site linked from the top menu (unable to do this in nuke?).