My company has a new project that will require a slicker and simpler blog interface - probably something more like Wordpress. We'd like to develop it in such a way that it will be usable for others - probably as a secondary module that could be installed alongside the existing blog module. Is anyone working on anything like this already? What's the best way to coordinate with existing work on the blog module?

If your looking at tackling some core module enhancements or major undertakings then the best place to discuss them is on the developer channel - http://groups.google.com/group/silverstripe-dev. You would get more feedback / suggestions from the core and community devs in that interface. Making it a separate module would probably be the best way forward to start with.

What ideas did you have for making it easier? For me it would be getting rid of blog entries from the site tree menu and use a different interface for managing articles - its near impossible to use the sitetree (for example on silverstripe.com we have over 200 blog articles and takes ~30secs to load).

Thanks, man. I'll ping the dev list as well. I'm hoping to not have to make any changes to the core. What we're thinking is that the Blog would get it's own tab in the backend and, just as you suggested, the blog entries would be removed from the site tree. We'll probably stick pretty close to wordpress in terms of basic ui layout, b/c they've already put a ton of thought into what makes for easy blog management. I suppose the goal is to make something that's as intuitive and simple for blogs as Silverstripe already is for basic CMS page management.

Anyway, we'd love to hear any other wishes/suggestions here as we go. Probably won't start active development for another week or two.