Weblog Database

Hi all,



Although I'm sure this is a topic that has been bounded about from pillar to post within this forum I am really interested to know what the more popular choice is for an individual when starting to develop a website.



I used to be a create it from scratch kind of girl but after discovering WordPress I feel that my coding expertise has been left adrift somewhat. Although I spend time wading through my chosen themes to tweak them into behaving I haven't really created a site from nothing in a long time. Is this becoming common? Have any of you moved from hard-coded sites into the easy to use content management systems on the market today? If so, which ones?



If possible I'd really love to hear some for and against arguments for these systems. Are they removing the desire to code, aside from those individuals that are actually making the themes? Is that necessarily a bad thing? How important is it for users of a CMS to have a fundamental knowledge in the things that make it tick (HTML, PHP, CSS, etc)?



Thanks in advance for your comments, I'll be watching with interest.



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