Codey from Indian Express is wondering about aesthetics and sensibilities of CMS:

If I remember right, way back in the dotcom boom era, someone had tried convincing Zdnet India to shift to Zope/Plone, since it was meant to be absolutely rocking from a geek point of view. That experiment did not go down well with the end users and it ended pretty much there. Being sexy from a geek’s point of view is very different from what it looks like from the end-user’s point of view. Case in point: there are a lot more of users on Blogger than Freeflux, though the latter is better for a geek any given day.

In the past four months, I have been pretty much doing the reinventing business at the new jig. I had evaluated most of the free/open source options and found none of them, other than the exception of Midgard, to be good enough to fit our needs. Most were either too complex or were too simple and I would rather have my team work with a set of known problems than have them dig around nested directories of endless libraries which might or might not break every time I want to customize the site or add a new feature, which would require hacking the existing code.

He also mentions the classic Open Source support question:

Eventually, when you take your product proposal to the management and tell them the best avenue for technical support for your solution is an IRC channel, don’t be surprised if they totally freak out on you, which is why a lot of media organizations sign up for outrageously priced Microsoft-based solutions.

We are currently deploying Midgard for a major Finnish media agency. It would be interesting to compare notes. Oh, and there actually is commercial support available for Midgard CMS.