RE: the most barest of barebones cms

> I do not need 90% of what is in most CMS systems.

I've found that 90% of the time, that's true. ;o)

> And even 
> more so - typically The kind of sites I have been doing - 
> they (clients) do not even want to be able to add new pages, 
> but rather just more content to existing pages (into the 
> database). So I kind of want to make one that is just the 
> backend and leave the front end up to the developer 100 % and 
> just use regular php. Is there such a thing? Maybe just a framework?

Have you looked at WordPress? All PHP. Barebones. Quite nice.

-Darrel