Lars,
At this point, I haven't actually looked enough at the existing code or evaluated what code we would actually want.
I think I can start the project within 12 months. Hopefully we can get some interested parties involved and begin working on it. Its a huge project, and I don't imagine it would be done before a year at all. Again this is assuming all volunteer effort. With that it might be shorter or longer depending on the amount of volunteer time available.
I think I good way to proceed would be to take one function at a time, abstract it out of CMS or write a new one, and fix CMS to work with it, or another sample UI application, so that we have some working code all the time. If we tackle the most important pieces we can possibly have a mimimally functional application in a shorter time, but a full CMS framework/toolkit will take longer.
Hmmm. Did I actually answer the questiont there?