cmsreport, guest feature

We are offering an opportunity, available to all, to come and spend a day with us in our office, to see how we work and spend the day using ocPortal. ocPortal is an open source CMS with many features and benefits. We believe this will be fulfilling both for those people who can make it, as well as for us…

• You get to spend a day in our office and have questions answered relating to ocPortal, (and maybe a cup of tea/coffee or ten, bring your own red bull though .

• We get some help with our documentation and help finding where it could be clearer. This is really important to us which is why we're opening our doors for what is effectively free informal training (for a limited time only).

The ocPortal office is located in Sheffield (England) and is about 25 minutes walk from the train station but it is easy to find. Sheffield is located just off the M1 (Junction 33). We can arrange parking if you are driving as long as we have enough notice. Please note that we cannot provide traveling or accommodation costs.

You can either reply to the topic on the ocPortal forum, send me a Personal Topic on the ocPortal forum or email me on steven@ocproducts.com.

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.

In this article series by Jeff Orloff and Mizanur Rahman, authors of MediaWiki 1.1 Beginner's Guide , we will learn how to organize our content by creating namespaces that allow us to group pages with similar purposes together, and we learn how to use categories to group pages with similar content together. It also teaches us about redirecting, moving, and swapping pages around so that we can ensure when a visitor comes to our site, they find the information they are looking for because the page titles will match up with page's content. MediaWiki has many built-in features that will not only help us keep our content organized, but make it extremely easy to do this.

In this article, we will learn how to make use of these tools including:

• How we can create Namespaces
• How to create Categories
• How to setup a Template for our users
• Why we would redirect a page
• How to move and swap a page

We have focused mainly on organizing content rather creating content in your wiki in this article. We assume you should have a few pages in your wiki. As our wiki grows in popularity, the amount of content it hosts will continue to grow so it is important to organize the content in your wiki so that our wiki looks better to our visitors and editing and reviewing content is much easier for our users. If we think of our wiki as a library, it is easy to see why we need to organize our wiki. After all, if you walk into a library with no system for organizing the books, movies, music, periodicals, and others you would find it hard to locate what you are looking for. Likewise, if we have no order in our wiki, then our visitors could find themselves frustrated when trying to find the information they are looking for. If they become too frustrated, they will go elsewhere.

I can't tell you how much I'm in awe of our sponsors. For several months CMS Report's sponsors have consistently helped finance the costs to running our site by purchasing banner space. For niche sites like this one, that sponsorship is important. Sponsorship helps us pay for the bills from our host provider, internet service provider, and any software or hardware needed to support this site.

CMS Report provides great content on a wide variety of CMS related topics. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, you can purchase banner space at this site either through Google's ad services or through BuySellAds. For those times that we have sold out on our banner space, BuySellAds does offer sponsors the ability to put themselves on a waiting list to advertise on our site. We've been holding the price of sponsoring CMS Report below market value so at times you might find the waiting a little long.

CMS Report wants to thank our current sponsors for their support.

Acquia - Acquia is a commercial open source software company providing products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system. With over two million downloads since inception, Drupal is used by web developers worldwide to build sophisticated community websites.

Open Source Training - Open Source Training provides training across North America on Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress. They have worked with Fortune 500 companies, state and local government, plus universities and colleges.

CMS Market - CMS Market is a directory for Joomla extensions as well as Mambo, Drupal modules and Wordpress themes.

CMS themer - CMS themer is a professional theming service catered to designers, developers and web companies who do not have the time or expertise to theme a CMS based on an existing website or design.

IHost.Net - IHost offers a number of web hosting services built on the DotNetNuke. iHost.Net's has serviced over 100,000 customers since 1996.

Sitecore - Sitecore provides web content management (CMS) and portal software for organizations to create compelling website experiences.