So... why not use pages? :)

Could you also explain what you mean with aliases for documents?

You can define a page type w/o controller (and view) - also known as container page.

Container pages don't have a public URL and can be managed in edit mode.

If you have a lot of documents, custom .NET solution may be a better option, but you get so many out of the box features with container pages which makes the custom solution hard to justify.

Jonah,

Let me give more background on this issue. We already have a solution implemented that uses pages. The problems is that application's owner do not like the user experience where a person must open a document that contains the document. The two clicks is considered jarring for them, especially since their legacy custom CMS doesn't do that.

Dejan,

Yes, this seems to be a good solution for what I have to do. It was my fear of losing out on the out-of-the-box features that made me hesitate in writing something completely divorced from EpiServer.

Hi,

I still don't understand what you're trying to achieve here. Do you have a page type with a property where the editor can select a media data? Is that what you mean by "alias for documents"?

If that's the case you can define the properties, which you currently have on the page type, on the media type instead. Especially if there's no need for the pages, i.e. should be publically available for the visitor.

It is a funky requirement due to this in-house, custom made CMS.

They want to have a link, let's say, http://clientsite.com/documents/CourtTestimonies 

This link would lead you to to a pdf that contain the court testimonies. What the want is to drop the link all over the place, and when they have a new version of it, they want to replace the document that the link points at.

This link must have properties so that they can filter them in blocks.

I suggested having an alias as a property, but they don't want to hunt down documents and change the value. They want to manage it from the permalink or alias.

I have worked with many CMS systems. This requirement is unique to this workplace.

Today, there are a lot of source CMS, which can be used for different types of sites: sites, business cards, portals, blogs, e-commerce. There are both free and paid content management system. Almost all systems have the admin panel with which you can add pages, text, images, video, etc. to your site.