Cocoon is easy
I just disagree with people telling that cocoon is hard to learn. If you get it explained by somebody who knows how it works, then it simply can't be hard. Perhaps it is hard for people because nobody takes their hand, and help them through the first few steps. After all, what is hard about it? You need to know some sitemap matching things, and you need to know how to write some xsls. Only knowing xsl, which you learn in twice the time you learned html, so about 2 days, and knowing sitemaps, you can make yourself valuable for a project. Not only valuable, but already productive. And after some time, you will be able to build sites yourself very fast. I am convinced that development in cocoon outruns any other framework, and when starting with the right patterns and maintain them, maintainance will be easy as well.
So, what is the problem. Why is not the entire world using cocoon? Were the founders too superior for other people to be able to understand cocoon? Did they have a brilliant vision, but forgot about (average) users?
Lately, I have seen many other projects developed in cocoon, and some things frustrated me extremely. The things the sites all had in common were:
1) The content repository was hippo repository, a repository implementing the WebDaV protocol
2) The customer was in control of maintaining their own sitemenu (all in the repository).
3) Standard cocoon components, either standard in cocoon, or standard added by Hippo
As you can see, 1 and 2 are part of the repository, which is the same for every customer (except for custom backend templates), and 3 is part of a jar we include in our cocoon build.
So, that should give a strong enough base, to implement sites through some sort of best practice patterns. But, and that is the weakness of cocoon: it is just to flexible. People do not know how to start. I did not look at blueprint yet, but it is an attempt to help people getting started with cocoon.
Now, for building websites with hippo repository and with using a sitemenu, we discussed about the best way to get started, and how to structure your pipelines. The result is something incredibly easy to use. It assumes one thing: you have a repository with some data and a genuine sitemenu. When you do have this, you have your site with a best practice pattern up and running (including paging through archives) within minutes.
All you need to do is check out a project.xml and a properties file and install the latest hippo cocoon plugin. You just deploy your site, and start it. After starting, you open your browser on the right domain and port, and start configuring cocoon from there (like which sitemenu's to use, if your urls do have a prefix, if you have cforms, etc). when ready, you have to redeploy, and start your site again. Then, you have the option to auto-generate a site, which is based on the sitemenu(s) structure found in the repository. All configuration is done for you. We use 5 different stores for cocoon, to optimize performance. All is configured and arranged in the default auto created site.
And more important, it is an incredible simple sitemap pattern and, evenly important, a strong and correct xsl pattern, build on import precedence concept. With this functionality, you help everybody starting with cocoon to learn the patterns, enable incredible fast development, and enable everybody to understand each others sites.
I hope to have a demo online on short notice.