Being the author of Pier (and SmallWiki), I am obviously biased. I do
not intend to start a fight or to try to cancel a decision of the
board, but to me this looks more like a huge step backwards.

> As promised I prepared a demo of current Squeak website migrated to
> Aida/Scribo CMS. I migrated both design and first level of content to
> show, how flexible is Scribo in dealing with both different design and
> things like Url format in case of SmallWiki. You can see demo here:
>
>       http://squeaksite.aidaweb.si:9000

This looks rather unprofessional. The pages are full of HTML
validation errors. The layout changes and is partly corrupted in edit
mode. The search functionality is broken.   Editing does not work in
some browser.

>  > Looks good. The editing looks familiar with the common widgets from
>  > editors  and powerful enough for the needs of the Squeak web site.
>
> Yes, we are using TinyMCE for editor and it is really nice.

TinyMCE takes at least 15 seconds to load on my super fast internet
connection. Are links updated when you move/rename a page? Can content
be easily exported in other formats?

>  > How is content in the side boxes edited ?
>
> Currently as pure HTML, but that needs to be yet improved. Currently
>  only admin has edit rights for that.

Pier supports multiple in-place editing areas. Editing is done using
the well-known SWiki/SmallWiki syntax. Pages and components can be
embedded into each other and reused. The overal layout of the site is
specified using the same wiki syntax and a composition of pluggable
components.

>  > Is the interface translated ?
>
>  Yes, just I need to detect language better. In an hour or so ...

Pier is in English and MIT licensed. It has fallback for all
JavaScript functions, so it works in all current browser (if
necessary, even in a text browser).

>  >> That's it, I think you can now see how easy is to maintain Scribo
>  >> based website and therefore I think it will also be easy to delegate
>  >> some maintenance duties to broader public. Of course there are still
>  >> other things to finish like RSS reader etc etc, soon, a day or two...

Pier has a blog plugin. It can aggregate external feeds and display
them as news. It can display commit logs of Monticello repositories.
And there are dozens of other ready-made and well tested plugins
available. And it is totally RESTful and search engine friendly (see
the scores of my web-site).

I offered to Danie Roux to migrate the existing site from SmallWiki to
Pier. This is rather simple, as the document representation is
essentially the same. To do this I need the existing image though.

For details on Pier please have a look at:

    http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/Archive/Reports/Reng07c.pdf

Cheers,
Lukas

-- 
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch