I just went surfing Sleepycat Software to read some documentation (don't ask me why, I just realized I have it all installed locally), when I noticed this: Berkeley DB XML. Apparently not yet released, but interesting anyway. I'm not big on XML DBs, but with Sleepycat doing it, it might be worth checking out. At least they have a great history of doing high-quality, simple, lightweight products that just do their thing with minimum fuss. And if they continue with their licensing policy, all the better. Then we just need some Python bindings...

DTML is really arse after two months of ZPT.

A Jupiter study — I'm usually highly sceptical of these, but hey, maybe they're right for once — says businesses are often dissatisfied with their content management solutions. Complexity, lock-in, overengineering, ridiculous prices abound.

Meanwhile, in Plone land: Plone Improvement Process (a formalized approach to improvements: this sort of thing seems to be pretty popular in the larger free software projects these days, have you noticed?) has a few interesting improvement proposals for an already fine system: Oslo Skin system and Navigation and validation rewrite.

These coupled with improvements to and integration of CMFTypes and possibly the brand spanking new TTWType promise a bright future. It's not perfect and probably not suitable to all situations (there's a clear community site bias, but it doesn't have to be used that way) but it is easy, powerful and has a lot of momentum. And clearly there's still lots of space in the CMS field to conquer. Zope 3 is coming, but this Zope 2 thing is nowhere near its end of life.