The ACS CMS sucks big time. It sucks so badly that it's clear an engineer designed it.
That being said, it does exist. Considering that some of us are really banking on OpenACS 4 to come out, I would like to make a case for porting the current CMS to 4 and then fixing it in later versions because:
a) It may be bad, but with some training and experience it may very well be workable. I haven't used it much primarily because I haven't been forced to and cms.arsdigita.com has no explanation as to how to make it work. I imagine, though, that if it were stuck on PG and I could do some work with it, I would figure it out and find it reasonably workable.
b) Nobody knows how to make it better right now because no one has actually used it. We can't compare it to OpenCMS, MMBase or whatever because we haven't played with it on an actual production site. After a few months of heavy use, I imagine the community will have some really good comments on how to improve it.
c) aD is working pretty hard on improving the current CMS. I know that it will be in Java, but it may be worthwhile to see how they learned from their mistakes and improved the system. Whether the switch to Java makes it nearly impossible to incorporate their fixes I am not qualified to answer.
d) The porting effort is already behind. We need something out, and a bad UI is better than no CMS.
So there are four points I'm offering to the argument. Basically, I'm begging for something to come out ASAP.
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