As some of you may have gathered, I have got quite a bit of experience with various CMS / Portal applications. However, I still want to get some input / feedback from some of the people here on a few things.

I'm currently getting back to an application I started sometime ago which is basically a modular based Portal, although it integrates a lot of common CMS functionality. I have already mapped out some very different ideas, the biggest being a higher level of security with permission based access as opposed to role based most commonly found. In addition the system will be multi-lingual and allow for content to be added and then translated through an inbuilt workflow mechanism.

The areas I want feedback on all relate to ASP.Net v2, as I have decided to migrate the existing work over.

What I'd like to know is what people think of the web part architecture in a portal / cms application. From my current playing around I believe that whilst it is functional it has several drawbacks with it's current scoping and requires a lot of additional coding to work in a permission based model.

I'd also like to know what people expect in way of themes / skins for a portal / cms application. An example here would be DotNetNuke which has an extensive skinning architecture allowing virtually any design to be conjured up. In addition DotNetNuke allows themes to be installed for use in a single portal only. My intial plan was to leverage the Themes capability in ASP.Net v2, however I think I'm going to have to extend this considerably since this allows very limited customization of actual pages.

Finally, I'd like to hear any other suggestions / comments people have to make. I personally have an extensive feature set already, however I would like to know what other people require from a Portal / CMS application and in particular any features they feel are lacking from existing applications.