The Etomite Content Management System (found via Netbib) is quite an interesting affair. What I don't like so much about the CMS: the default theme. Sorry, but it's colorful and looks to me like Windows. Besides, it uses a table layout, which I also don't like so much. But otherwise I have to say, this thing has something to it. The backend in particular is very interesting - it uses JavaScript and DHTML extensively, which of course isn't so great if you don't like JavaScript. But it offers a whole lot of interactive features that are quite nice - for example, feedback on ongoing actions, automatic updating of various interface elements, and overall quite smooth operation.
I also like the idea of snippets - something like nuggets in PyDS. Small code snippets that you simply store in the database and then retrieve in templates via tags. Very practical, as you can often build simple smaller extensions this way without having to reinvent the wheel.
The automatic caching is also quite interesting - nothing really new, but in this case a nice idea: you can specify for the elements themselves whether they should be cached or not. And for each element individually. Significantly better than the usual all-or-nothing approaches of other CMS.
Overall, Etomite is much more full-CMS-oriented than blog-oriented. Functionally, that puts it more in a group with Drupal than, say, WordPress. There are already a number of snippets for easy extension, as well as themes. Various language files already exist too. Documentation exists as well, and even at first glance it's quite usable for getting started.
The license is GPL, which is good. However, a special notice appears on first login that cannot be removed - actually, something like that conflicts with the GPL, because the GPL specifically says that I can do pretty much anything with the package, as long as I make the modified source available. Ok, I can't claim it's from me and I must preserve original internal copyright notices, but otherwise I can change everything. And that normally includes notice texts. Forced links and forced notices are simply incompatible with the GPL. Either you have to explicitly extend the GPL to include this notice - which then makes it a GPL+addendum that becomes incompatible with the standard GPL - or you refrain from forced notices. This is a not unknown problem for people with the GPL, but something like this can definitely be troublesome in commercial use.
Has anyone ported Kubrick to Etomite? I'd need a somewhat nicer theme than the one supplied for my experiments.