Items Manager - ver: 1.4

[Angryboy]

If you don't care that items are created as pages....

Yes, that's the whole point :-)
to separate it completely ... that's why this flexible items manager is so nice ... but it's an "almost" - not "THE" ....
by the way - nested categories is one more thing in the list ...

But what is necessarily wrong with having them as pages? You could even argue that having them in this format is more flexible, since they are able to have all of the functionality of regular pages in addition to whatever custom features you add via Special Pages.

If the problem is that because they are "regular" pages they are still shown on the 'View All Pages' admin page, then the only thing I can suggest is that mvlcek introduces a 'Hide from 'View All Pages'' option for Special Pages, so it at least feels or seems like it isn't a regular page. With this option, I'd fail to see why anyone wouldn't choose to use Special Pages if it provides everything else that they want, since really it is a cosmetic gripe more than anything else :-) In fact, because the pages are just indexed as normal pages, your users can still search for the items with the regular search function of the site: something that could not be achieved if the items were completely separated.