“It should be as easy-to-install and easy-to-use as WordPress — easier, actually, would be better. Not-requiring a database at all would be awesome. To be successful, like WordPress it would probably have to be done in PHP, since PHP remains the commonly-installed scripting system on shared webservers.” – Brent Simmons

I’m still using WordPress personally, and I still recommend it professionally. I do great deal of new site prototyping in WordPress (even if the final site isn’t). Even with the flexibility of custom post types, a fairly robust plug-in architecture, and the option of the multi-user network – I long for the lean, mean WordPress of 2004.

Or at least a viable competitor for a simple weblog in 2011.

I agree with Brent Simmons that this hypothetical system needs to have a 5-minute or less setup time. I don’t believe it should be in PHP.

I think client-side Javascript – it’s even more prevalent than PHP

For a while now I’ve been tracking Aaron Quint’s work on using sammy.js & CouchDB to build out web applications. While it’s not as technically mature as I’d like (nor do I have a sandbox up) it’s very compelling. Especially with CouchDB’s baked in versioning, feeds, and replication.