I think ETP is nice and simple. Its also the package I learned how CR works together with file-storage.
I think each UI that presents CR in a different way is good. The aim to properly and consistently use the CR. So different packages may use the content items, without breaking the content item.
Deds is working on the bcms-ui-base... etp thing mentioned by Caroline. So we should end up with a bcms-ui-base that should be 5.x compatible, some ETP compatibility, etc. As an interim for Dave's xcms (next ver of bcms-ui-base). It is still encouraged that ETP bug fixes still continue.
While Deds was also working on bcms-ui-base, the issue of explicit sorting came again. ETP has this feature to order items. I used a similar method on bcms-ui-wizard, and did not implement anything for bcms-ui-base. This is because I am still waiting for which solution to take, while creating bcms-ui-base and none the projects that time needed explicit sorting. I just pointed out to Deds the code on bcms-ui-wizard which is heavily borrowed from ETP. So in the end bcms-ui-base may still use the ETP tree_sortkey for sorting items explicitly. Which is not good since this is the primary reason why ETP could not be ported to Oracle. It is possible to use cr_item_rels or cr_child_rels order_n column. I think this issue has cropped up and we should deal with this sorting issue. Any thoughts of this?
One of the ideas I came up but did not implement is to make a navigation page content type. And child relate the different content items to it. The draw back is, we need a separate admin UI for it... more complexity. The plus is, you can have any number of navigtion page with different sorting.
