At 09:35 20/03/2011, Tudor Girba wrote:

a content management system for programmers.

Exact. This is actually why I chose Pier for implementing my software platform for "online programmable CMS" [1]. During the past two years, I've been deeply extending Pier and never regretted my choice. As a matter of fact, Pier comes with a powerful CMS model.

To add a user-friendly interface on top of it would require an explicit and new project on top of Pier. The infrastructure is there and is powerful.

Exactly, and it's feasible since:
(a) Pier offers appropriate abstractions for plugging rather easily application-specific interfaces.
(b) Seaside offers powerful tools, e.g. JQuery, for implementing such interfaces.

For example, I've rather easily implemented on this basis several sophisticated interfaces [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Actually, all of them reuse a "home-made" framework for interactive hierarchical interfaces that uses Seaside-JQuery.

Cheers,
Reza

[1] http://www.afacms.com/blog/pontoon-app
[2] http://www.afacms.com/blog
[3] http://www.afacms.com/cats/contracts/
[4] http://www.afacms.com/cats/concepts/
[5] http://www.afacms.com/cats/activities/
[6] http://www.afacms.com/cats/activities/shopping/Seaside/