The Reflection CMS is primarily for small to medium sized websites (under a million users) and represents an effort to bring traditional operating systems concepts to the management of web properties. We hope ultimately to appeal to refugees from Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress who wish to build extensible websites - but find the basic architecture of these products unsuitable or lacking for various reasons.
We intentionally do not plan or even attempt to be 'all things to all people'. Where Reflection might be a good choice is in the areas of authentication, user management, object permissions, site security, and a relatively uncomplicated application deployment platform. This is not to say that other systems do not have these abilities, but they often are implemented poorly and the inadequacies are so deeply embedded that they cannot easily be fixed - and security controls are often too complex to be easily verified. We also have attempted from day one to integrate with existing network infrastructure in a platform neutral manner.
One of the main areas where Reflection is different from other content management systems is in the concept of what is called the 'core' and subsequent 'addons' (or 'modules'). Getting simple changes made to core functions in most CMS products often requires endless debate - and many times the 'core' is so jealously guarded that changes you require for your own website requirements never happen at all. And if the changes actually are submitted, you're then stuck with upgrade issues before you can make use of them. While we provide abilities to provide add-on applications and services, often these require changes to core functions to implement in an efficient manner. We provide ways to completely over-ride core functions if they are not suitable to your needs and without waiting for patches and updates. If you don't like how the function 'xyz' works, simply copy/create a new function called 'xyz' that works exactly the way you want and drop it in a startup file - and yours will take precedence. It's your website, not ours.
Developers or others interested in learning about Reflection (and why you may find it useful) are encouraged to visit the Mercurial source repository. Reflection is approaching alpha release at which time it will be presented officially here. While it presents several new concepts in content management, it is loosely based on the continuation of several related projects which represent years of web development. Reflection is (unencumbered) open source.