greetings...

hello everyone, allow me to introduce myself.  i'm josh and for the past
5 years i've been a professional/corporate (see: slave) developer,
primarily on enterprise software applications.  in the office i use java
technologies and at home i use php.  

i discovered postnuke a few months and back toyed with it here and
there.  of all the open source cms/portal systems in its class, i
thought it had the best architecture and development platform.  knowing
that it had a large community of developers was also reassuring.  i was
never one to pay attention to the postnuke mailing lists, so all of the
drama and the reasons behind it had escaped my attention until recently.
now that i've been charged with the task of implementing a site that
will require an extensible cms,and like many others out there, i have a
decision to make.  additionally, i anticipate joining that project as a
developer.  

there are some questions i have before making that decision, so please
be so kind as to suffer my ignorance.  let me also add, that i've yet to
install encompass with postnuke, or envolution itself.  with that said,
here are a few of my concerns: 

one of the most important requirements of the project i'm working on is
that i need control and flexibility in my page layouts.  encompass
obviously supports this, but to what extent?  can i control what blocks
are displayed on a per module basis?  when developing custom blocks and
modules, can i use templates for layout, or am i bound to using (choke)
the pnHTML api?  

what appeals to me about encompass is that it is available today. 
however, after reading the specs and various posts on blocklayout, i
personally prefer its approach to templates over the encompass method.
anyway, just because it looks good on paper doesn't mean it's good in
practice.  putting differences in philosophies and the exodus aside,
what would you say are blocklayout's weaknesses?  and since i haven't
done any experimenting with it myself, what could encompass do better?  

i also have some questions regarding how envolution's development
community will operate in terms of growth, internal processes, etc.  i
read the vision document and it gave me somewhat of an idea, but i'm
interested in further detail.  but i'm going to wait to post that set of
questions, as i need more time to formulate them all. 

let me finish up by saying i'm excited about envolution.  i like its
intended purpose of removing everything but infrastructure code from the
core and making everything else pluggable.  that makes the most sense to
me architecturally.  and i like that these mailing lists are populated
with dedicated people who apparently like working together.  keep up the
good work.  

thanks in advance, 
josh 

oh yeah, i tried signing up as a member on envolution.com and have not
yet received my password.  can someone please take a look at this?