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when Slashdot was sold, E2 remained independent.

Some of the profits of the Slashdot sale went to Blockstackers as an investment to develop E2. Unfortunately, the dot-com crash (and, to be fair, not enough effort spent marketing the software) meant there was little market for the underlying CMS.

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And the underlying CMS was pretty messy if memory serves.

There was a time when everything that managed content in some way was being renamed "CMS" in order to fit into a category that was selling at the time. Fitting sometimes very oddly shaped things into the category was common, and I think a lot of cool software got needlessly mangled (TWiki also went off in a lot of weird, occasionally "CMS like", directions to satisfy some sort of enterprise dream that hurt its usability in a lot of ways).

It wasn't great, though for 2000-era mod_perl code, it was decent. It had a lot of solid ideas that predated the Rails-wave of web development, but they could have used a lot more polish.

That's good to hear. It (and a python-based rewrite) was one of the first software projects I looked at and had a chance to mess with when I began to learn to code.

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