drupal

Wordpress. Joomla. Drupal. Plone. Choosing between the top content management systems is something every business with a web presence must do eventually, so wouldn't it be nice to compare them side by side at your leisure and then learn the ins and outs of each from acknowledged experts? CMS Expo, coming May 3-5 to Evanston, IL, lets you do all that and more. This unique conference allows aficionados of the top four content management systems to come together under one roof to share best practices, make new ones, and, of course, convince those on the fence to choose their CMS over the other three.

The guest list for CMS Expo 2010 reads like a who's who in the CMS world: Mitch Pirtle, Chris Coyier, Dries Buytaert, Alan Runyan, Ben Bassi, Ryan Ozimek and more, all together at one conference dedicated to improving all four CMSs. The conference offers seven tracks: Business, Foundations, Power, Joomla!, Drupal, Wordpress and Plone so that business owners familiarizing themselves with the CMS world and web professionals looking to push the boundaries of that world can collaborate under one roof and share their expertise with like-minded individuals from across the CMS spectrum.

Whether you represent a growing small business, a thriving nonprofit, a savvy educational institution or any other organization looking to streamline its web operations with a content management system, CMS Expo is your chance to pick the brains of the pros of each of the three major CMSs on the web today.

Drupal's "premier conference" is quickly approaching. This Drupal conference is known as DrupalCon and will be held in San Francisco from April 19-21, 2010. As with previous years, the unofficial theme of the conference is to "learn about all things Drupal". If the conference sessions aren't enough, the schedule is also packed with plenty of development, documentation, and training events that are being held the days prior to and following the conference.

Presently over 1500 people have signed up to attend the conference. The price of attending a DrupalCon has always been reasonably priced which is one of the reasons this conference always sees a high turnout rate. If you plan on attending the conference, I would urge you to buy your tickets to DrupalCon now. Procrastinators like me have been known to wait too long to register for this conference only to find out that the maximum number of available tickets for the conference has already been reached.

Also, CMS Report is proud to be a media sponsor for DrupalCon - San Francisco 2010. This is our first time we have sponsored a DrupalCon event and we're excited to be helping out by promoting this event. While you can learn quite a bit about Drupal at this conference, the conference also gives you a chance to see and hear directly from the the open source community that is supporting Drupal. As a user of Drupal, it's not just about the software that sparks our interest in DrupalCon but also the people in Drupal's community we have come to know and appreciate.

Earlier this week, I announced a new site that I'm working on under the domain SocPub.com. What I didn't say in the announcement was which CMS I was going to use for the site. I also didn't say that my choice in the CMS version could be considered by some as risky. I have decided to use the alpha/beta/release candidates of Drupal 7 for the SocPub site.

Using an alpha version of any CMS for a production site is never recommended, but I have some personal reasons for why I want to do this. No doubt, there will be bumps in the road using these early versions of Drupal 7. However, I'm hoping the benefits outweigh the risks and in a small way testing early versions of Drupal 7 may offer me an opportunity to give back to the Drupal community. For example, installing Drupal 7 has allowed me to collect some screenshots of a Drupal 7 Alpha 1 install.

If someone wants to use the screenshots below for one of the image galleries at Drupal.org or any Drupal community site, then permission is granted to use the images.

Using the above image, one of the first things you will notice is that you now have a choice in the type of Drupal install you would like to do. Currently, you have a choice between a "Standard" install or a "Minimal" install. I personally never like to make things more difficult than they should be and so I recommend you select "Standard".

As the image above reminds us, Drupal 7 has some server requirements that must be considered. Is PHP 5.2 or greater available on your server? Have you initiated your settings file correctly? In Drupal 7 this walk-through is improved by letting you know Drupal's latest requirements and giving you some hints on how to resolve potential install issues.