WordPress as a CMS – content sections on a single page

Hey there,

I have sort of a general question, I’m just wondering how some of you out there go about accomplishing something I often need to when using WordPress as a CMS.

I’m talking about arranging content into columns or sections scattered around a template page. Currently, I’ll either call posts from a specific category or use custom fields, but each of these seems flawed. Custom fields are great, but when you have several lists of items you need to put on different areas of the page, it gets complicated to have a pile of custom fields, especially if you deploy the project to a client and have to explain how it works. Importing categories of posts is a little bit better, but still somewhat clumsy.

Then custom page templates come in to play, they’re wonderful things but it seems very unnecessarily complicated and inefficient to have a template for every page.

Now I’m sure there’s some secret out there to a much better way to accomplish this, some huge plugin I somehow haven’t encountered. I’d love your opinions on the matter, how you accomplish things like this without making the editor garbled with tables and classes and other clutter.

Any opinions are welcomes, thanks in advance!

(feel free to link me to relevant stuff, I’ve done searching but nothing has really dealt with this specific issue)