"People say that failure is important because it teaches you. I think that you can learn more from success. You learn what works as opposed to what doesn’t work. As no success is perfect, you still learn from the effort and improve from there.
That ability to learn is how you become a successful CMS professional."
- Laurence Hart, The Content Management Expert Paradox, Word of Pie, March 26, 2012.
This month marks a new milestone for CMS Report, the blog, news, and aggregated website turned three years old. When I wrote the first post, I wasn't quite sure where I wanted to take the site, but I knew my enthusiasm for Web content management systems would get me wherever I needed to go. Three years later, CMSReport.com has seen over 1,700 original articles posted at the site. Pleasing to me, not all of these posts were written by me as I have always appreciated the contributions of content by others here at the site.
During the life of CMSReport.com, I have occasionally been labeled by others as an expert in content management systems. I've never been comfortable with the expert label for a couple of reasons. First, I'm well aware of some very qualified leaders in the content management field that easily make me look like the amateur that I am. Secondly, the strength of CMS Report has really never come from what I know about CMS. Instead, I believe the strength and survival of this site has always been dependent on what I do not know about CMS but enthusiastically want to learn.
I've learned a lot about Web CMS since my early adventures into open source applications such as SMF, Wordpress, Drupal, and even Mambo. Today, we put focus on a mix of open source, propriety, community, and propriety content management systems. In all this time, I still believe my first observations for the need of sites like CMSReport.com hold true:
Building a site for the Internet, whether for business or personal use, can be overwhelming. Where do you start? Well that's the question I would like to help answer.
Earlier this year, I mentioned that one of my personal goals was to "get healthy". Last week I went under the knife on the operating table. The procedure I had was a microdiscetomy and foraminotomy which basically means the neurosurgeon enlarged the window near C6/C7 where the nerves for the arm leaves the spine. This all in hopes of reducing the pain and increasing the strength in my left arm.
Translation: While I have a lot of time to kill while recovering the next couple weeks, I'm only able to sit at the computer in half hour increments. That doesn't give me a lot of time to either mess with code or produce good original content. However, a half hour is plenty of time to upgrade my sites to Wordpress 2.1 and Drupal 5.0!
In the next couple weeks you can expect changes in the look and feel for CMS Report. I don't have a Drupal 5.0 theme and it likely will be some time before I settle on one. Hopefully, those of you that are creatures of habit won't mind the fluctuation of changes you're about to see. You can still expect new posts flowing through the same RSS feeds as you've seen this past year. What you likely won't see though is the return of this four column theme. Stay tuned...
For the most part, I usually say "no" to making New Year resolutions and IT predictions. I never really get things 100% completed to say I've resolved those things that I previously promised. I have yet to ever fully predict what is just around the corner for IT (actually it almost usually turns out better than even my most optimistic predictions). However, no matter the time of year, I always have goals that I strive to meet.
The following are some of my open source IT goals for 2007:
