brotherhood_of_LAN - 10:26 am on Aug 3, 2011 (gmt 0)

The points/pros are fair lorax, but you did forget to mention that it is an 'out of the box' website, it wasn't too long ago we were having to make sites from scratch! The CMS's main benefit; it saves time.

I went old-school the past month or two and developed a basic flat-file CMS, no DB reliance, all CSS/templates/file structure can be customised down to the last character, but in the end it's quite simple and just delivers content by piecing together HTML fragments (header, navigation, footer), CSS, JS, and finally the content.

I was thinking I could add JQuery on particular pages if I required it. The structure and admin is there, and I have the basic HTML/JS knowledge to get it working.

Isn't that the benefit of Wordpress? The fact that it has all these hooks and plugins, the basic WP is a 'master of the DOM' and it can all-happen behind the scenes with pointing and clicking a GUI. Every element of it is defined and can be expanded upon by plugins.

The bare-bones CMS I have weighs in at 140K, including HTML and admin, I've always felt that WP, Drupal and the like just have too much extra stuff in there and it's a bit like learning a new language entirely; getting to grips with a new system of the scope of WP.

Sorry that I haven't discussed the pros and cons compared to other popular CMS's. Though one good point I can think of, it's good for SEO content to appear more mainstream because of its popularity web-wide.