I just stumbled upon Silverstripe / Sapphire a week ago or so (now is the 3rd November 2008) and I was amazed. This seems to be an underestimated piece of software. I'm not such a pro that I could say it for sure but I believe their code is very solid, clean and intelligent. They just got and award for the most promising open source CMS which might be a hint in the same direction.
- The CMS still lacks the vast amount of plugins and modules if you compare it with Joomla or Drupal but their code seems more advanced.
- The whole CMS uses the active record pattern approach and a clean MVC design. If you create a new pagetype you can add new db-fields in the page class, flush the db built via url and the cms inserts the new tables and fields.
- Building templates is easier compared to Joomla for example, thanks to MVC and thanks to a two level approach using templates and subtemplates called layouts. E.g. if you have a page type called "BlogPage" the "BlogPage" Class first looks for a "BlogPage" template and if it doesn't find it it looks for a "BlogPage" layout and inserts it at the given place in the template.
That's just my first impression after a few days of dabbling around with it.
