One of my favorite yearly conferences is the CMS Expo in Evanston, Illinois. I'm not sure if I've ever been to a conference where so many open source CMS leaders in one room. Whether your CMS is open source or proprietary, you need to be at this conference. Whether you're a business leader, developer, content author, or analyst you'll be doing yourself a great favor by being at this year's CMS Expo.

So it should be no surprise that when the conference Co-founders, Linda or John Coonen, ask me to promote their conference that's what I'm going to jump at the opportunity. This is a great conference and if you're wanting to promote your CMS, CMS Expo is the perfect venue to make your presence known.

It's Time For Your CMS To Take Center Stage

With over 1,000 CMSs on the market today, it’s more important than ever for top-tier and upstart CMSs alike to break out from the crowd, reach new prospects, and get their message heard. The 2012 CMS Expo is the ideal venue to stand out from the rest, and be recognized as an industry leader.

The 2012 CMS Expo Call For CMSs is now officially open.

Is your CMS on the list yet? If not, contact the CMS Expo team today via email, or by calling (815) 455-2900 to get pricing information and how to become a Featured or Spotlight CMS at the 2012 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference.

CMS Expo in Chicago last week gave me a great opportunity to learn about a variety of content management systems. I spent most of my time at the conference getting out of my comfort zone by visiting with those companies and open source projects that I knew the least about their products and services. Unfortunately, this strategy also prevented me from visiting with my personal favorite CMS, Drupal. By the end of the conference, I felt I needed to treat myself by attending one of the final sessions in the Drupal track, Social Drupal.

What key activities should you integrate? In what scenarios might you be smarter to leave the heavy lifting to an outsourced solution?  What elements are critically important right now when building your social relevance in the market?  Find this out and more at this practical advice session on how you can be using Drupal to capture the Social Media audience which awaits.

My hope for the session was that it would give me good pointers for how to connect my Drupal sites better to the social web. Lullabot's Blake Hall led this information packed session. Blake began the session by pushing his vision that this session should not just be called "Social Drupal" but also "Community Plumbing (without the crack)". The proposed rewriting of the title for this session is a reminder to the audience that Drupal has always been social.

Blake started the session reminding that one needs to take a look at the bigger picture by taking a look as your site's Social Media Strategy. This strategy would include the following elements:

• Authentic Story
• Honest Dialogue
• Engage your audience
• Activate the social media

While the big picture is always nice consider it's the details that help determine whether your site is going to succeed. From this point forward Blake focused on specifics and I feverishly did my best to keep up. Some of the notable remarks from Blake that caught my attention:

• First step is to take a look at your business goals and the resources you have available when building/supporting your site. Blake of course sees Drupal as being able to address both ends of this equation.
• Some of the social modules for Drupal he recommends include Feeds, Flag, Twitter, Dashboard, Fivestar, Messaging, Radioactivity (gotta check this one out!), and Organic Groups.
• Speaking of organic groups, take a look at groups.drupal.org: especially Social Networking Sites group to tap into Drupal community's expertise on social publishing.

One of the coolest things about CMS Expo 2011 was the opportunity to see five open source CMS "founders" together in one room. On the conference stage were Dries Buytaert (Drupal), Andrew Eddie (Joomla), Sigurd Magnusson (SilverStripe), Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke), and Per Ploug-Hansen (Umbraco).

Most people in the content management world will acknowledge that seeing these five guys together in the same room is a rare event. What you may not know is that for many of these open source leaders this event was the first time they have ever met one another.

We tend to focus so much of our time on our own projects that we lose sight of what is taking place outside of our own bubble. The benefits of open source projects getting to know one another better has me thinking a lot lately about the "The Strength of Weak Ties" and the importance of getting to know your competition.

CMS Expo 2011: Founders' Panel from SilverStripe on Vimeo.

The sound quality in the above video could be improved but I think we're just lucky enough to have the video. I'm not aware of any "official video" being taken by the conference organizers so we're fortunate the SilverStripe folks who shot this video were thinking ahead.

The roots for CMS Expo run deep with Joomla!. If you're looking for experts representing the Joomla! open source community, this is the place to be. I've been looking forward to this presentation on Molajo which follows a Tour Joomla! presentation I've also been watching. I'm here not only because of the impressive speakers, Jen Kramer and Amy Stephen, but also because I sense that Molajo offers something new and different for the Joomla! community.

Molajo means from Joomla! - it's name is created from the letters of the Joomla! name. In much the same manner, Molajo is a distribution created from the powerful and flexible Joomla! 1.6 application framework. In the future, it is anticipated many Molajo distributions will be shared, each crafted for different vertical markets.

Amy Stephen is speaking in the session. Her first emphasis is that there are a number of Jommla! members, including Joomla Elders, that have been involved or consulted with this project. The idea of a distribution in Joomla! is a rather new concept but there are already distributions in the wild. For instance Nooku Server is a multi-site distribution of Joomla! 1.5.

Some notable impressions I'm getting from this session include:

The use of content management systems in government is a personal and work interest of mine, so this is a panel that I'm looking forward to hear from the speakers. There is actually a lot of diversity in what governments need their CMS to do and I'm curious to see how well the panel handles that diversity. I'm expecting Tony White, Ars Logica, to be the moderator for this panel. 

Leaders from Featured CMSes will be on-hand during this panel discussion to participate in a live analysis of the CMSes, asking probing questions of each, to determine how their represented Content Management System (and supporting community and infrastructure) best meets the demands of today's governmental needs, whether at a municipal, state or federal level.

Represented on this panel are: Lee Middleton (SilverStripe), Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke), Brian Colhounyan (TERMINALFOUR), Benjamin Mack (TYPO3), Ken Wasetis (Plone), Jeff Kline (Accrisoft), and Casey Neehouse (Umbraco). The following questions were asked either by the moderator, Tony White, or audience members. The panels' answers to these questions are paraphrased.  

What features in your CMS make it a good choice for government?

• Plone - Government is already actively using Plone. Plone can address complex and flexible workflow. Import/export capability for security purposes.
• TYPO3 - Addresses accessibility (Section 508 in US government).
• Umbraco - Lots of state agencies are switching to .Net CMS. Umbraco and Dotnetnuke are .Net CMS. Section 508 compliance. 
• Accrisoft - Local government is the specific client for this company...delivering a turnkey solution.
• TERMINALFOUR - The UN is a client. Multi-language is why the UN chose TERMINALFOUR for their CMS. 
• SilverStripe - SilverStripe sees government as partners and have built a very robust product that can be used by government.
• DotNetNuke - Microsoft has helped partner with DotNetNuke which has been a positive in introducing DNN and open source to all level of governments.
  

For the final session of the day at CMS Expo I decided to sit in on the tour of Plone talk. Admittedly, before this session it had been a long time since I took a hard look at Plone. I love the Python computer language, but I've never came across a project that sent me to Plone. Don't let my inactive use of Plone give you a reason to not consider it for a project of your own...Plone has a lot going for it.

Plone is among the top 2% of all open source projects worldwide, with 340 core developers and more than 300 solution providers in 57 countries. The project has been actively developed since 2001, is available in more than 40 languages, and has the best security track record of any major CMS. It is owned by the Plone Foundation, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, and is available for all major operating systems.

Ken Wasetis, President and CMS Solution Architect at Contextual, was the speaker for this session. After giving usual general background information for Plone, Ken quickly dives into what he believes to be one of Plone's biggest strengths: security. Due to the security strengths he also emphasizes to the crowd that Plone is larger than you think in government.

I'm sitting in a CMS Expo session on search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the descriptive term used by marketers to describe the process of luring traffic to your site by improving your position in search engine indexes.

Believe it or not, this is the first time that I've ever sat on any type of SEO discussion. I"ve just never worried about it as good content on a niche site like mine seems to already do well.  Evidently, that's not the case for all sites. Perhaps, I'm also lucky in that I have a lot of SEO already built into my site by using a CMS such as Drupal that tries to stick with standards. It probably doesn't hurt that I also have keywords such as "cms", "report",  "content management", and "Ruby" already baked into the site.

The speaker for this SEO Marketing session is Avery Cohen, founder of Metrist Partners. My Internet connection for this session isn't good, but I'll do my best to highlight some of the better points and keep this blog updating as the session goes on.

Lots of the things that Avery is going over in this session are general well-known SEO improvements tips.  For example, as a site owner you want to improve your inbound link initiatives. However, he's doing a great job on bringing up the details. For instance, some ways to increase links to your site as the more links you increase to your site the more search engines will take notice:

I'm sitting here in the first session of CMS Expo. I've chosen the track that included the TYPO3 Overview session because TYPO3 is one of the few content management systems at the conference I know little about. Yes, I've heard the name TYPO3 but that is about the CMS. Benni Mack, Release Manager for TYPO3 version 4.4, is speaking. I don't know if you can consider this blogging "live" but I'll update the past as the session goes on.

TYPO3 is a mature, enterprise-level, open-source content management system that has been actively developed for ten years. There are currently over 500,000 installations of TYPO3 worldwide. TYPO3 has over 4000 freely available extensions, has been translated into over 30 languages, and is actively being developed in a community of over 100,000 users. The TYPO3 package has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times from Sourceforge and is used by enterprise-level organizations worldwide.

Notable remarks presented in this session:

• TYPO3 is marketed as "THE enterprise CMS in Europe". Forty percent of municipalities in the Netherlands use TYPO3. This CMS is really big in Europe. I hope to ask why they are having a difficult time breaking into the United States market.
• Element-based CMS that sits on PHP and runs on mySQL (and other databases).. Effective Image Manipulation, Flexible Content Elements (Drupal and other CMS users may know this as CCK).
• TYPO3 is completely community driven with backing. TYPO3 released under GPLv2 in 2003 and TYPO3 Association in Switzerland in 2004.
• TYPO3 has a core...with an extension system. Benni has a sign on his slide with "Warning: It's real open source". However, core is definately stable and most extensions work. Extensions can also be installed by one click from typoe3.org. Something we're finally seeing more and more in other open source CMS.
• Media assets handled in some in core, but there is a host of extensions that can handle the variety of multimedia as well as manage it.
• TYPO3 is good in "complicated setups" found in the enterprise. TYPO3 is good for long life cycles found in the enterprise. 

I asked the question on there thought about the limited size of the TYPO3 community here in the United States. Both speaker and an audience member says TYPO3 has started to really push their presence in the US in the past couple years. This CMS is just waiting for its moment to be seen as the platform choice for a larger Web site.