“RE: Vignette, Zope, Manila, Conversant, and more”

Manila is nice, but it needs a strong feature set. I think it is in the same class as Blogger at the moment -- very good for what it does, but you run into its limitations rather quickly.

Zope is much more interesting, but the technical stuff to install and maintain it is way over my head. If I were going to run a Zope system I'd have had to go with an outside consultant to set it up for me. I'm very impressed with some of the applications built on top of Zope, but the learning curve seems awfully high compared to Manila or Conversant.

What I'm really surprised at is that there aren't more CMS systems aimed at medium and small web site operators. Aside from the Open Source ones like Zope there's Manila, Conversant and little else until you're ready to committ a lot of money. I know I'm not the only one out there with a site getting 2 to 10 million page views a year saying "I wish there was a better way to run my site".