Install: I chose to do SVN since it's much newer than the last release. It was a horrible HORRIBLE pain to do. The manually setting up the MySQL was easy enough, but making sure the right things were changed was not. I had to temporarily skip hacking attempt to set correct authid and link for admin page, then undo the skipping of the check. All in all, very very difficult, and not something someone who's new to php/mysql should attempt. If you're not strong in them, use the standard release (which I also tried, and it was quite easy... though I disliked the using computer username as defaults in the mysql fields)

Performance: So far, it's the fastest loading 'true' cms I've found. I toyed with a few that were nothing more than simple template engines that were faster, but didn't have user management, etc. I'm quite impressed.

Themes: A small learning curve, and very little worked right 'out of the box'. I've had to tweak things here and there, but its been really easy to figure out what needs done. The fact it's more or less raw php makes it MUCH easier than many CMS's out there which force you to learn their entire template language. (*shudders at the horrible experience with typoscript*)

Security: Haven't done extensive testing yet, a quick round of ideas to try didn't manage to break anything, but I really think more fields should check for code input and disallow bad characters. Not impressed, but neither am I running for the hills.

Expandability: I'm saddened to see no real mods out there for this. The fact everything is fairly simple php does make for easy changing to suit needs. With the nature of how it's written, it makes it easy to do anything you want.. it needs more of a community to really help it along.

Overall: I'd rate this, for a complete php newbie, one of the worst. It simply relies on php knowledge to get things done. That said, for someone who understands php at all, it's definitely one of, if not, the best. The reasoning for this, it leaves a LOT open to customization, fairly straightforward read through code, simple organization of variable structures and files... would be nice to see some form of admin panel file editor since so so much is controlled from php... but easy enough to make due with a file editor and ftp client.

Once I get a better hang of how it operates and can learn more about the intricacies of doing advanced template manipulation, I can see this working very very well for me. I think I'll stick around for a while.

I would just like to thank you for taking the time for posting this. It is nice to see another point of view from someone new to the system

The installer within the SVN is a DEV installer, it has checks and outputs things that will not be shown on my new installer (AJAX based). Yes it is buggy, currently it does not install the Default theme, nor does it login properly nor set the Authid for some links upon install.