Content Management Systems?

OK this is going to make me sound like a complete idiot, but can I ask what is the point of a CMS. I was looking over the Joomla site and I don't understand what the benefits are of using one of these CMS. I guess I'm sort of asking htis question because I always hear people talking about their CMS's but I never really understood what they offer, so I guess my question is what are the benefits of CMSs?

 

Quick updates to a site using pre-defined templates that anyone can do... they allow non-programmers to manage and add new web content easily.

 

It's a fantastic timesaver. You'll never get the complete control that you can have over each and every page that you'll get by coding each page by hand. But imagine for a news site adding 100 stories each day. You can just cut and paste the story into the template and it's automatically linked to from all of the other relevent pages.

 

Thus far, every site I've built I did manually and used php includes to call the template... but I had to do the navigational and page building manually. I did this because I could not find a CMS that gave me the control I wanted in an interface that I could easily learn.

Now, as my sites grow the upkeep gets harder and harder. Adding content takes a tedious amount of time, and I've decided now to use a CMS and sacrifice some of the freedom I've enjoyed. It's a small price to pay to add content so much faster.

 

Burt,

The 3 posts directly above this one pretty much tell you all you need to know and I agree fully with what they each have said.

 

Basically I get the impression CMS is about speed at the expense of flexibility... well I'm not at the point where I feel I need methods of getting my content up lightning fast - I just don't have enough of it - so I guess my current methods will more than suffice. Thanks for the input guys.