Last year I was one of the beta testers for Acquia's Drupal distribution and the Acquia Network.  I was evaluating Acquia's products and services for a potential intranet project at work.  For this particular project, unfortunately, it looks as if Acquia or Drupal wasn't the right solution.  Our regional folks wanted a solution similar to Microsoft's Sharepoint that is more integrated with Microsoft Office and heavily featured in document management.  That's alright though because there are a number of smaller intranet projects at work where Drupal is the perfect solution and a lot of progress is being made in that direction.

Over the weekend, I decided to move CMS Report from Drupal 6 to Acquia Drupal.  In December, I received a message that beta testers would be rolled over into "a Community subscription entitlement that extends through December 31st, 2009".  Placing the Acquia subscription onto CMSReport.com not only will allow the site to receive the benefits of being on Acquia's network, but will also allow me to monitor the evolution of Acquia.  Acquia is still a young company and likely will continue to expand on the products and services it offers.

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.

The year 2008 was another great year for CMS Report. In 2008, we posted close to 500 articles to the front page. Below are the ten most read articles that were posted for the year.

Similar to last year, three of the top stories have little to do with content management systems.  It seems that there is more interest in gadgets than content management systems!  Hopefully CMS Report can help change that.

1. Dell releasing the Mini 12 netbook this week?
2. Drupal shopping carts: Ubercart and e-Commerce module still the way to go
3. The Mac and Windows Alternative: My Linux Laptop
4. Social Publishing Systems to topple the CMS
5. Another weekend with Drupal 6
6. Joomla 1.5 & Drupal 6.1 Performance Comparison
7. Drupal SMFforum Integration module no longer supported
8. The iTouch Alternative: Nokia's N800
9. Best PHP Open Source CMS: Drupal wins, Joomla and CMS Made Simple tie for second
10. The Dangers of Reviewing Open Source CMS

As always, our thanks to all those who continue to return to this site to read the stories, join in on the conversation, and even submit articles. I'm not sure we would be doing this if it wasn't for the interest shown by others visiting the site.  May everyone have a great 2009!

Away from this blog, I've been putting a lot of energy into how best to work with social software in larger organizations (Enterprise 2.0) behind the firewall.  My professional attention has been shifting away from using Web content management systems, social publishing systems, and other collaboration tools on the Internet.  I really think the next big advancements and challenges for web technologies will not be on the World Wide Web, but the less explored intranet ran by medium and larger size organizations.

In one form or another, I've been involved on both sides of the firewall in my organization. Ten years ago it was a huge challenge for organizations and businesses to figure out how best to utilize the Internet to meet their business needs. As challenging as I saw the Internet for my own organization, I'm convinced there are greater challenges on the intranet side of the house.  For the most part, we all can see what the others are doing with their Internet Web servers, but few of us get to see what other organizations do with Enterprise 2.0 behind their own firewalls.

"The usability of a content management system is paramount. If authors and site owners can’t work out how to use the CMS, you’ve got nothing. The CMS can have all the functionality in the world, but usability trumps it all."

 -James Robertson, Practical ways to assess CMS usability, Column Two, November 25, 2008

Editor's Note: There have been moments here at CMS Report when I am amazed with the insightful and in depth comments written by some of our readers. This is one of those moments. Chris Jewitt, left us a comment regarding several popular content management systems (CMS).  The CMS mentioned in this brief review are Joomla!, Wordpress, Dotnetnuke, Plone, Drupal, Alfresco, and Sharepoint.

I moved Chris Jewitt's comments have been moved to the "front page" so the story isn't missed by those visiting this site.  Any hyperlinks found in this story have been added by the editor.

Below Submitted by Chris Jewitt on December 4, 2008 - 1:42am.  

Fatwire Content Server 7.5, a Web content management system (WCM), was released this week.  Fatwire's Content Server intends to deliver a compelling web experience by building, deploying, and managing large-scale and interactive web sites.  New features in CS 7.5 include:

• Site Preview: Allows business users to set up time-based versions of their website and preview what their site will look like on different future dates, including side by side preview of date-based versions. With this new tool, business users and marketers can create seasonal and time-based online campaigns with ease.
• Customizable and Extensible User Interface: Provides the ability to configure the content management user interface by role to support customers’ business processes entirely. Users can have a dashboard tailored specifically to their content management process for dramatically improved efficiencies.
• RealTime Publishing: A dashboard view provides a transparent look into the publishing process. New capabilities offer full control of content publishing at a granular level, as well as error prevention and process recovery, for maximum efficiency in this critical component of the WCM process.