Brian from remotesynthesis.com has just posted a review of Bytespring CMS. You can view it here. Here are my initial comments about it for reference.

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Hi Brian,
thanks for the great review. It's really encouraging to get some positive feedback on the project. Just a couple of notes on the issues you raised.

Installation -
It's really aimed at the shared hosting environment, so ease of installation and maintenance was a high priority. It's really nice to be able to just zip up the whole site, data included and give it to someone on a disc. Not using a datasource has it's limitations, but for the size of the sites we're talking about it's really not a problem. The system caches the site's data in memory when it's initialised, so performance is good. I've tested it with up to 2000 pages and initialisation time is still only around 2 seconds.

Passwords -
I had planned to encrypt the passwords, but it's not a huge issue since the only person that can accesses the files is the site admin. Now that you mention it, i guess it's probably worth doing.

User Roles -
The admin role is really the only one that gives any extra permissions over an anonomous user. The guest account is virtually the same as being anonomous. I added the role based permissions system in there to give it the flexibility to be extended in the future, but there's really not that many uses for it at this stage.

Workflow -
The workflow is designed to be super simple, so as not to confuse the people this system is targeted at. I think adding some kind of versioning system would be positive ... with the option to say role back to the past 5 versions or something. However, complex workflow with drafts and publishing rules may step over the boundaries of what I was aiming for.

Thanks again for the good review and I be eagerly awaiting the scorpio public beta to get a look at some of those issues you mentioned.

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