Well I bet we could learn from looking at the UI to some CMS's like
But I don't think it'd benefit us to use PHP since TCL is so embedded in AOLserver. It just seems wiser to use TCL like we do already plus our CR has a lot of functionality that just is not put to good use in a user friendly, functional, content-management-generic UI yet.
Midgard sounds great according some articles on it ( Getting to Know Midgard and Data-Drive Sites with Midgard ) but it also sounds like it relies heavily on being associated with apache, mysql + php. I don't think mysql will scale like postgres and definitely not like Oracle. And we of course are not using apache here.
Zope sounds great and powerful and built in Python which is object-oriented. As far as I can tell, Zope is possible to use without a webserver as it runs in it's own application server. So I guess it is a possibility to use it. But this would greatly complicate the system administration side of things (running OACS and Zope!) and basically duplicate all efforts at security/permissions/users/groups/etc. Basically at that point, I'd think you'd be talking about replacing OACS with Zope which I'm sure would be just as complicated as running an OACS site with just a different set of CMS UIs to deal with! Though on the pro-Zope side, it seems there are some good Zope books and reference articles out there.
So enough rambling, basically I think looking at the CMS UI's built on Zope (Plone) and Midgard (Aegir) might benefit us in getting our heads around building a good basic, general use CMS UI package on top of our CR. Maybe make CMS into a general TCL library (exposing CR API) for CMS functions and then build a basic CMS UI using the new CMS library... not a small task I know...
