The CMS now supports full categorization for writing pieces, and now all that's left in that department is do add a tool to manage catergories and descriptions. This opens up the doors for also adding tags to blogs and tutorials as well.
Before, the catergories I had were hard-coded and I could select from 4 presets that were in there temporarily. Now, the writings.php pahe is completely dynamic - it displays each writing piece as long as it is marked as "published", and even further, it lists it by catergory with the catergory description as well. This is a great step forward, even if it doesn't look much different on the front end.
I've given a lot of thought into how I will eventually need to allow for themes, but honestly as daunting as that is, it's nowhere near as frightening as finding a secure way to update the raw php files on a remote server when I add functionality for updates. Luckily many of the other CMS systems out there are open source, and I should be able to scour the files to see how things are done elsewhere.