The CMS Melting Pot

Written by John Coonen

Wednesday, 06 May 2009 18:00

About a year ago, a number of us who were involved in putting on the two 2008 CMS Expo Learning Conferences were noodling out a way to build on a great thing. We started planning the spring 2009 CMS Expo as a conference which would engage the communities from multiple Content Management Systems.

While we had success at training one specific CMS (Joomla!), we figured out rather quickly that much of what needs to be taught about how to plan, create and manage effective websites, while relevant to the CMS used, is actually CMS-agnostic.

We tossed up about fifty ideas into the mix, which boiled down to three specific agnostic Tracks, which we incorporated into the 2009 CMS Expo to help bring people from multiple featured CMS solutions together. Those three tracks are:

CMS Foundations - No matter which CMS someone uses, they need to know the basics on both the creative and technical side. Getting to know the "Stack" is important, such as Linux, PHP techniques and MySQL, and so are creative tools such as Photoshop, CSS. Note: In the future, following your suggestions, we may split this into two Tracks (Creative Foundations & Technology Foundations).

CMS Business - More than one person who attended the 2009 CMS Expo only attended the CMS Business Track! No Core CMS sessions. No Foundations. Just business. And they loved it! The business-end of website creation is a critical element in the ABCD's of creating a sustainable web presence (Admin, Business, Content and Development). So, we reached out to the business community to help us provide relevant business training in business planning & strategy, marketing, sales, support, and site usability.

CMS PowerApps - As each CMS has its own terminology to denote extensions, plug-ins, modules, etc, we decided on the term, "Power Apps" to describe important add-ons and partners for one, or multiple CMSs to extend their power. We found some excellent folks to deliver training on PowerApps such as KickApps, Magento, Jentla and more. This area will most certainly expand as development houses expand to further empower CMSs. The expansion of the mobile web will further push the need for training in this realm.

As your hosts, Linda and I could not be more thankful to all the Attendees, Instructors, Sponsors and Exhibitors who came together this spring to help make the 2009 CMS Expo's experiment of bringing together multiple CMSs under one roof, to serve one incredible and rapidly growing community - the CMS Community.

Thank you!