Lamar,
Thanks a bunch for your comments, they're very useful.
Yes, AOLserver and all its modules is a very central piece of the problem.
And I agree that CVS and Daemontools in the current docs are distracting, and a simple approach which tells you how to do the others as add-ons would be better.
I do want to comment on your first paragraph, though:
"However, is it really an issue since the toolkit requires significant customization anyway? This is not an easy toolkit."
This is precisely what I'm trying very hard to change. I want to make OpenACS instantly useful for real-world problems out of the box. Obvious application areas are the groupware space, personal blog+photos+whatnot site, and cms.
Sure, you can customize to an incredible degree, which is definitely the strength of this toolkit, but I don't think many people will ever see the light unless they get some gratification in a very short time. They'll just decide that OpenACS sucks, turn away, and never come back. "It's a dead project. A Mozilla."
In other words, OpenACS is still going to be a toolkit, but it should also do things that we believe a lot of people will want to do, with no coding, and with very simple installation.
Which is why I started this thread.
/Lars
