Although, I like to consider myself unbiased when I blog about content management systems, it is no secret that Drupal holds a special place in my heart. Drupal was one of the first CMSs I used that didn't "dead-end" me on a project I was required to support. Over the years, the Drupal community has treated me well, even during those times when I was very wrong in my judgment of Drupal. If Drupal was not a part of my world, I'm not sure I would even be blogging about content management systems. Drupal is the open source standard for which I judge other CMSs.

So, it should come to no surprise to anyone that when John Coonen inquired if I would moderate a Drupal in the Clouds panel at CMS Expo, I jumped at the opportunity. I am excited about the high caliber people that will be on this Drupal in the Cloud panel. The panelists include Joni Klippert from Standing Cloud, Kieran Lal from Acquia, and Jeff Walpole from Phase2 Technology. If you're trying to figure out what is involved in getting your Drupal site, services, and support to the Cloud, these are the people you want to have in the room answering your questions.

Even if you have no interest in Drupal for your CMS, I encourage you to attend this panel to learn more about content management in the Cloud as well as SaaS and PaaS. Like many of you, I've had my concerns and doubts in the past about the Cloud. Is all this talk about the cloud and SaaS a marketing gimmick? Is there any real benefit for my business to putting content into the cloud? During last year's CMS Expo I got my initial answers to these questions after talking to the folks at Acquia, Accrisoft, and Agility. The move toward the Cloud and software-as-a-service for content management is the real thing. It wasn't just the people from these companies that convinced me but their customers too. 

If you are at CMS Expo this year, be sure to attend this 3:30 PM Drupal in the Cloud session on Wednesday, May 9, 2012. If you're worried that you may not know enough about Drupal or the Cloud to enjoy this session, please attend anyway. CMS Expo is geared for the newbie as well as the expert and I think this will be a great session for everyone to attend.

Every year, I find it an honor when I'm asked by open source projects to announce that they have entered been accepted as mentoring organizations into Google's Summer of Code program. I'm a big advocate of college education and I also understand the importance of a summer job to keeping those college bills under control. Open source projects and the Google Summer of Code provides this opportinuty for upcoming software developers. The Summer of Code is a "global program sponsored by Google that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects".

There are several goals to the Google Summer of Code program:

1. Create and release open source code for the benefit of all
2. Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development
3. Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers
4. Provide students the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits (think "flip bits, not burgers")
5. Give students more exposure to real-world software development scenarios (e.g., distributed development, software licensing questions, mailing-list etiquette)

The Summer of Code program provides college age students with alternatives to the typical summer employment at the local grocery store or fast food chain with an opportinity to work the code and on projects that inspires them the most. Google will provide a stipend of $5500 USD per accepted student developer, of which $5000 USD goes to the student and $500 USD goes to the mentoring organization.

The problem I have with top ten lists is that inevitably there is a story that should have made the list but didn't. Last week, I posted CMS Report's Top Ten Stories of 2011 and wished I could have included additional stories. The articles listed were ranked by popularity based by how many times viewed and the rate that they were viewed through the year. Popular stories do not always signify well written articles and they aren't always an indication of my personal favorites.

In case you missed these stories the first time around, below are ten additional content management articles we published in 2011. Every article deserves a second chance to be highlighted or tweeted again.

• Book Club: MODX The Official Guide
• Open Source CMS, Market Share Report, and White Elephants
• Review of Drupal's Building Blocks
• Judging Five Open Source Content Management Systems
• Book Club: Pro Drupal 7 Development
• DotNetNuke 6 Released (Screenshots included)
• List of Fake Content Management Stories from April Fools Day 2011
• Drupal 7 has been officially released 
• Moodle 2.1 Released
• More than an Introduction to Accrisoft
  

When I read the stories we post here at CMS Report, I am reminded how quickly the CMS market continues to evolve and mature. Every year, I worry that there is nothing "new" to write about in this information system niche only to have the developer, user, or owner of a CMS push another new story idea toward my screen. This time around when looking for the top ten content management stories of the year, I concluded we didn't have ten great CMS stories for 2011. Instead, I found more than two dozen great CMS stories for 2011.

Below are the top ten stories of 2011 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. The stories in this list are ranked based on the rate they were viewed since they first appeared at CMSReport.com.

Top Ten Content Management Stories of 2011

1. The 2011 Open Source Awards
2. Google+ first week of use review
3. 10 New Content Management Systems via CMS Focus
4. Another new term: Social Content Management
5. CMS Expo 2011 Series
6. Liferay Marketplace and Liferay Portal 6.1
7. CMS Redefined: Cloud. Mobile. Social
8. CMS Report upgrades to Drupal 7
9. DotNetNuke, Drupal, Liferay, and SharePoint in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals
10. CMS in the Fast Lane: Joomla! 1.7
    

Last weekend, digital agency water&stone, released their 2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. I consider this report one of the few non-bias and detailed surveys that come across my desk each year. The report isn't perfect, but the report does help give a good snapshot on the state of who's who in the world of open source content management systems.

You are most definitely going to want to take a look at the details in the report. The findings in this year’s report were based on a survey of more than 2,500 CMS users and additional research into a wide variety of measures of market share and brand strength. I'm still combing through the survey and taking note of the interesting individual nuggets of information that can be found in the results of the survey.

Not surprisingly, the report confirms the ranking position of open source's three most dominate Web content management systems in the market. The press release itself summarizes the results this way:

PHP-based systems WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal continue to dominate the web content management space. But, while the Big Three remain unchanged from last year, the Report concludes that WordPress retains a clear lead in the face of decreasing competition from Joomla!.

The decreasing competition from Joomla! can be seen most noticeably in the decrease of installations reported by the survey respondents in 2011 compared to 2010. The survey does note that this dramatic drop is likely due to the Joomla! community aggressively promoting the survey last year. This year, the promotion efforts were not coordinated and less influential. I only point this out because this is an example of where the report isn't "perfect" via inconsistencies in the yearly survey sample introducing  a margin of error in the trend comparisons. 

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm currently playing catch-up in discussing all the good books sent my way this past year. Many of the books have been sent by the authors and publishers themselves for review and some of the books I've bought on my own dime. There should be no further evidence that I'm a procrastinator in posting book reviews than this particular review of Todd Tomlinson and John K. Vandyyk's Pro Drupal 7 Development. This book was published almost a year ago, and I'm only now finding the time to blog about this book.

While it has been close to a year since this book was published (about just as long since Drupal 7 was released), I marvel how relevant Pro Drupal 7 Development remains as a valuable resource to me. This book and its previous versions have saved my hide so many times that I have lost count. This book may have been sitting on my desk for a year but I assure you it hasn't been collecting dust.

If you're going to get any Drupal book in print this is the book you should get if you're going to do any development with Drupal or simply need to troubleshoot your way out of a Drupal related problem. I realize there are a lot of resources available online from the Drupal community that contains much of the same material found in this book. However, this book organizes the material in such a thoughtful manner that I find the looking up material via the book more efficient than seeing it out though online search.