Has anyone used a CMS?

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Content Management System?

I wonder if anyone could give me their opinion on them. Are they worth getting?

I have a website more or less built and wonder whether I should manage the content with a CMS.

Probably not. Any CMS is hard to style.

Use a CMS:
- The website is up very quickly, but looks ugly.
- You can manage you content easily, but are restricted to a common formatting
- There are lots of ready-to-use modules

Write your own scripts:
- The website needs more work, but looks exactly as you want
- You're free to format anything, but it's tricky to keep up a common style
- You have to code every feature yourself

I've coded my own homepage from scratch. But for club websites that change often (latest news and so on) I tried different CMS:
- Joomla: Much too complicated!
- Contenido: Quite nice, but the backend is tricky to use.
- Drupal: Wonderful to use, but hard to style.

Thanks for the advice. I have come across a job that specifies CMS in the job spec. Do companies think it useful? Based on what you say I'd assume they don't want to use one.

Depends on the company and what they do. I've seen companies that do business workflow automation using J2EE or some equivalent (SAP, Microsoft's ASP+EF, etc) - like banks or something which moves data through a process to achieve some goal. If you're doing fluff like publishing content to the web, a CMS seems more popular. Coding web sites from scratch seems to be vanishing completely. Everything these days is built on a platform.