My primary tool for Content Management and Templating is CityDesk by FogCreek Software.    The tool is pretty slick and great for people like me who keep their laptops w/ 'em most of the time.  

The scripting language is quite weak right now (no vars, basically nonexistant string manipulation functs, hard to scope & define content sets) but it's gotten the job done so far and I'm sure it'll get better over time.

Content compiled in CityDesk is FTP'd to my personal website which is hosted on a FreeBSD box by my ISP.   The primary reason I used a desktop-based system was because I didn't want to rely on any hosted code @ my ISP (simple cgi-bin stuff being the exception).

The comments system is from cgiComments;  I described some of the integration work here.  It was far from an 'out of the box' experience to get the two working but I was eventually able to resurrect enough of my derelict programming skills....

Within the site, I make relatively detailed use of client-side includes (for ex., the list of recent articles along the left hand side) to minimize the amount of compiling / uploading that CityDesk has to do.