At the 2013 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference I have the privilege of moderating a panel focused on the Cloud. That's actually a broad topic, but I think it's a topic that is increasingly becoming well understood by the CMS community. Last year, I moderated a similar panel and, in my opinion, we spent way too much time trying to define the Cloud. This year, I'm hoping we're past the "what is it" phase and spend much more time talking about real problems, real benefits, and the challenges the content management industry may be facing by moving toward a Cloud solution.
"So much ink has been spilled deriding the false concept of a "Facebook friend," but I can tell you that a "Facebook friend" is better than nothing."
- Paul Miller, "I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet", The Verge, May 1, 2013.
I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. The custom CMS discussion has reared it’s ugly head a few times this year. Ron Miller asked his Fierce audience “why would companies still be building a custom CMS” as recently as this past February, which also spawned a discussion on CMS Connected the same month. For us, this is the third time this year we've come up against this most ethereal of competitors. The first was in a pitch in March with a local ad agency who insists that a custom CMS is the most efficient way to go. That was followed by an ongoing discussion with one of our long-time customers about whether they would renew this year in the wake of building an internal development team.
A few days ago, the Joomla Project introduced a new version of their content management system, Joomla! 3.1. As usual with these updates, Joomla 3.1 introduces a number of changes and bug fixes. While better late than never, the most significant new feature in this release is dynamic tagging across content-types.
Petr Palas, founder and CEO of Kentico software, lets his voice be heard to in this week's CEO Corner. In this article, he provides rebuttal to an earlier CEO Corner written by Agility's Michael Assad. Where Assad favors a "best of breed" approach and questions the validity of CXM, Palas believe the future is in fully integrated CXM solutions. Which CEO is right? We'll let you decide...
On my to-do list for quite some time has been wanting to talk briefly about some of the new features included in the latest release of Agility CMS. You may recall that CMS Report migrated over to Agility's Magazine Publishing Suite last Fall. So, keeping up to date on new features added to Agility CMS is not only a news story but also something of personal interest to me.
If I learned anything from my open source vs. proprietary CMS post, comparing CMS’s based on the method used to code them is no longer that relevant. Following the great discussion that was triggered convinced me that comparing along this dimension no longer contributes much to the CMS selection process.
The other thing I learned was that being cheeky, while good for attention, probably isn’t the most forthcoming way to educate the readers of this great publication. So this time around, I promise to be more thorough and objective! Hopefully we’ll get some insights from the community again as well!
For the past few years, CMS Report has generally not posted CMS announcements which only contained bug fixes and no new additional features. So, it's been rare for us to post the "point" release announcements for Drupal as Drupal only introduces significant new features in the new full version of Drupal (such as the forthcoming Drupal 8). However, Drupal 7.22 contains a lot of minor changes so we thought it was worth talking about. Drupal 7.22 was actually released a week ago, but I didn't have time to upgrade any of my Drupal sites until this week nor look at what was actually fixed.
What I find silly about this week's proprietary versus open source discussion is that I don't think proprietary is the biggest threat to open source. The biggest threat to open source is from within. Open source as a whole needs to do a much better job in preventing the discussion of Open Source Community versus Open Source Vendor from getting out of hand. Open source must accept the role commercial vendors have in their community or they will soon find their community is financially unsustainable and difficult to be taken seriously. Vendors must also prove to open source that the community is better off with them than without them or that vendor is going to have have little influence at the community's leadership table.
It takes awhile for open source as a community to respond positively to the changes that new or successful vendors may bring to their community. Most new vendors in open source soon realize that their standing in such communities is ranked not by their company's success but by how much they give or don't give back to their open source community.
The calendar is moving fast toward one of my favorite content management focused conferences, the 2013 CMS Expo which is hosted in Evanston, Illinois (near Chicago). This year, the conference will be held on the 14th, 15th, and 16th of May once again at the Hilton Orrington Hotel. Learning & Business Conference. This event is billed as a "Learning & Business" conference showcasing some of the world's leading content management systems and the people who power them. Whether the CMS you favor is proprietary or open source, focused on small business or enterprise, non-profit, government or commercial applications, there’s something for everyone at CMS Expo.
If you still need to register for CMS Expo, reading this article might help save you $100 from the full registration price.
