Having barged into the licencing thornbush, I should comment on the system.

I think your website is great, the install is instant (under thirty seconds from homepage to finished configuring). No problems there.

Technically, I have to say you *do not understand* XML. You say you "utilize the speed and convenience of XML". What exactly is that? The content is stored in escaped format, so it is not possible to run XML tools over it (like XSLT). The encoding of the content does not leverage any of the convenience of XML, because my entire stack of tools for manipulating, querying, and working with XML data can't get at the data. It is opaque. Regarding speed, I doubt you get any speed advantage over a custom format for storing the pages. (I see you are using SimpleXML, which builds fat DOM objects.) Certainly there is no extra portability gained from your use of XML, because you have made your own custom container format, which to a certain extent locks the content into your CMS.

I don't mean to lay into you, but I work with XML a lot and would have made some different design decisions at the start to open up some of the potential for bringing the vast range of XML tools out there to bear. For reference, I wrote a three-part high-level tutorial to my thought processes when I last refreshed my site offering some thoughts on using XML in CMSs. nicholaswilson.me.uk/…

Secondly, and I think Camen would agree with me here, you have made the choice of re-inventing the wheel by implementing everything in-browser rather than using external tools. Almost all systems do this, so I guess you are joining the crowd with Wordpress, Drupal, and so on, but I personally dislike systems where all the management is done in the browser. Article versioning? Use git/hg. Site admin? Use scripts. Backups? Done along with all your other documents. Article authoring? Use your favourite editor; the system can take the directory of documents you save and serves it up as the site. This approach will hardly endear you to newbies, but it would be nice to think that re-implementing file management and so in the browser was a conscious choice.

At the end of the day, I would be interested to know what the point of SimpleCMS is. The information architecture is basically the same or a bit worse than for instance Drupal, and doesn't seem to offer anything novel. The implementation is basically the same as all the other run-of-the-mill CMSs out there, as far I can tell from a quick browse. There are no comparisons on the website with competitors. What made you want to write it? Do you have any cunning features, like uses of taxonomies, SVG editing integration, flexible post tagging, and so on? What is new or interesting about the system?

There are some very innovative groups out there, like Symphony CMS, experimenting with new ideas on the fringes, so what I would find most exciting would be if you could identify one or two genuinely novel or ideas or improvements to current CMS designs. Given that your architecture is extremely similar to Drupal, you could position yourself as a minority alternative to the big players on the basis of your special features and try to promote those ideas. Move the world forward by promoting your experiments and see if you can advance the way people think about designing and managing websites.

On the other hand, I might be just being too technically-minded about this. Your unique selling point from the site seems to be ease of use, so if you really think you are offering something better than say Wordpress in terms of usability for people new to websites, by all means keep plugging it. I am not a UI expert, so you may be onto something I have not noticed there. If you are marketing towards new users of CMSs though, please do make sure that as you design your custom formats for the pages and data you maintain alongside that tools so your innocent new users are not locked in. As it stands, migrating out of your CMS would require someone to write scripts, so if you are targeting the users who cannot do that, providing them with an exit route would be polite.