David,
Excellent point!
Most people have from my wild guess, rolled their own CMS for client projects because time was a serious factor and the clients had very specific requirements.
Hopefully these projects noticed the content repository is a good foundation for a CMS and saved themselves some work.
I have been thinking about this the last few days and yes we need an organized effort to make if easier to implement a CMS. In the UNIX style I am interested more in small parts that I can hook togther to make a CMS rather than a huge pile of code that does everything.
Right now the CMS package in OpenACS has every feature anyone could possibly need, but it is so generalized that it is an ideal system for noone.
My plan (dream?) is to break apart the good bits of CMS into several smaller service packages that can be put together to build many different CMS systems. I haven't had a chance to evaluate how this will be done, but I definitely want to coordinate this with the community.
We should have the new web site up soon (no, I won't give a real deadline, but we do have a plan of action :) After that I would like to start a subproject to evaluate the pieces we would need to build a CMS toolkit.
ETP, CMS, etc will then become similar packages that use some or all of these tools to implement different types of CMS interfaces.
