Did you guys know that there are some interesting CMSs borne out of CodeIgniter like Cogear, and can be thus considered half-brothers? PyroCMS is by Phil Sturgeon (one of the CI Reactor leaders), another is FuelCMS which is quite good, Ionize CMS is led by guys from France, Switzerland and Sweden, etc.

There are plenty of CI-based CMS, BUT I like Cogear because of the «Russian flavor», which in my opinion is a mix of code efficiency (you make the most out of what you have, while Americans tend to be wasteful) and a better understanding of community (the West is more individual-oriented) and the importance of content-sharing (Bitrix, Datalife understand this, but in the West the corporations enforce copyright so CMS tend to be little more than glorified blogs).

I like Cogear but I think it needs more sense of purpose (like the saying goes «there is no favorable wind for a ship without destination») and I think it has to come from the attributes already mentioned:

1. Code Efficiency and Scalability (0 queries to serve most pages), Caching (OpCode, Memcached, FileCache, etc), support for Nginx and Varnish Proxy


2. Content-Sharing (easy to host files, images, video, or adding links to third party hosting sites, like DLE) regardless of copyright holder (just make sure you have a «Flag» button for reporting DMCA)


3. Community-oriented, making it easy for any user to create not just a «Group Page», but a full-on mini-site (that's the lesson from UCoz), and most importantly


4. Incentives for users everywhere, rating, points, ranks, awards, etc. anything to «Gamify» the site, because human interaction has a very strong «game» component.

With the above attributes, especially with the mixture of Community and Gamification, Cogear could be not just a Content-Management System, but a Social Content Management System or SCMS that would reproduce in the digital world what people do in real life: interact and share stuff in complete freedom, regardless of what corporations or big governments think, with plenty of reputation and prestige indicators for users, and plenty of indicators of the social value of content — the big problem with the blog format is that it tends to make time (recent) the only variable for relevance and we know that it is not the case (a new comment does not make an old stupid post suddenly relevant, and yet it appears on top in most «forums»). Social valuation (points, number of comments, number of views, favorites, recommendations, etc) should replace chronology as the main way to sift through content, allowing user history and its network to present content that is relevant for him, whether the post is «new» or not.

Since I don't know programming, my contribution cannot be in code, but I can finance ($) the construction of a system based on the above guidelines if anyone (hello Dmitry!) wants to professionally work on it using an escrow site such as vWorker or Elance to keep things serious in terms of goals and money.

Regards