SilverStripe has introduced a new preview release of the upcoming 3.0 version. Some of the main changes are in the separation of the Sapphire framework from the CMS module.
There is also quite a bit of work underway to redesign the user interface as well. Here is an example of some of the work being done so far:
Check out the latest version by grabbing a copy from here: http://silverstripe.org/pre-releases