I'm toying around with open source content management systems for a couple of personal projects I'm working on. I'm going to start playing around with drupal (PHP) and umbraco cms (.Net). I'm in the process of installing them into a sandbox area to do more experimenting.

I started thinking more about this stuff after I attended developer training for Percussion Rhythmyx. Being involved in the world of UED and having been a developer for equally as long, I was a bit alarmed by the publishing interfaces presented to users, not to mention a handful of architectural decisions that didn't make sense to me. Rhythmyx looks to be a powerful CMS tool, but the UI design looked too much like programmers deciding how things should look based on the architecture of their application. The question in my mind is whether the target users (all non-programmers) will get it, particularly at the complexity at which it is being implemented. Things start to get non-intuitive with complexity :(

I had a strange thought -- I wonder how many Apple Macintosh users are using MS Live Spaces? I'm a Mac users, and a PC user as well, and I like both equally. Personally, I thinke Microsoft did an awesome job with Windows Live, not to mention Spaces. I used to subscribe to .Mac and found it way too limiting. It had an interesting concept of "in place editing". It worked... some of the time. Creating a website hierarchy using their webware was like pulling teeth with a rusted pair of pliars. Apple's solution was iWeb, unfortunately, Apple made it way too difficult to use iWeb on services other than .Mac, which I thought was highly unfortunate.