During the past couple years I've had some brief but rewarding content management discussions with Deane Barker from Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive.  Dean has worked with quite a few Web content management systems over the years and appears to be most passionate to using eZ Publish.  Naturally, our discussions almost always involve Dean talking about ez Publish and me talking about Drupal.  Unfortunately, as I am more of a system administrator than a developer, the information I have been able to provide him about Drupal has always been limited.

Well, it looks as if Deane Barker has finally decided to get on the Drupal learning curve and find out more about this great CMS.

I’m working with Drupal for the first time on a hobby project I’m doing with Seth Gottlieb (about which you’ll hear much more later…). Adam Kalsey — Drupal ninja that he is — is advising us on the technical implementation, and he’s been a great help.

Why Drupal? Because I didn’t know it, and figured I needed to. Seth and I, after all, had the discussion
about how there are people like to feel smart and people that like to
feel stupid. Learning Drupal has made me feel plenty stupid, and that’s
exciting. And there’s no better time to feel stupid while learning than
on a project you’re doing for yourself.

I'm always excited to see very talented content management people discuss their initial experiences with a CMS.  If Deane writes more about Drupal, I suspect his writings will be very similar to the Drupal writings of Sacha Chua.

Although I had a lot of fun this summer, I allowed a lot of commitments to slip though my fingers.  Many of those commitments were made here at CMS Report.  The following is a list of promises that I haven't kept.  My apologies to those that had expected more.

• I never got around to reviewing Barrie M. North's Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (link via Amazon Associate).  My apologies to the author as well as the publicist.

• After all the experimentation and posts I did before the official release of Drupal 6, I never got around to discussing my experiences with the CMS after Drupal 6.0 was officially released.  For now, let me just say that it has been an experience running a site on Drupal 6 with some of the more essential third-party modules still under development (Views, Panels, Subscriptions, etc).

• Elgg's Dave Tosh and I still need to complete that email interview on Elgg 1.0.  Dave was busy and was at first the one slow to respond to emails.  However, during the past two weeks, I've been the been the busy one and the ball is still on my side of the court.

• After two years, I and Deane Barker (Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive) still need to get together for a geek chat.  Depending on the time, I think we owe each other a beer or a cup of coffee.

I have to admit that when someone submits a story and I trust them...I sometimes don't read the whole article before I publish it.  So until I read Dean Barker's Gadgetopia, I didn't realize his company, Blend Interactive, was featured in eZ's SHARE! magazine.  The irony is that if I had read an article posted at my own site by one of eZ System's own people...Dean's post wouldn't have been new news to me.  Sigh, I have been just too busy...

You may not have heard of Blend Interactive, but they do sport a decent portfolio of sites they have developed and designed.  Probably the most likely well known work from the company is the home site for the instant messaging client, Pidgin.  The SHARE! magazine features Blend Interactive, in part, because it is one of the most enthusiastic users of the eZ Publish CMS in the United States.  eZ Publish's roots is in Norway and the software is more popular in Europe.  But, as the eZ article implies, there is a push to generate more users in the United States.