Showcasing the Best In the CMS World

The CMS Association is pleased to welcome the Google Summer of Code Program to the 2010 CMS Expo Learning and Business Conference, to be held May 3rd, 4th and 5th, 2010. Over 2500 students have participated in this program since its inception in 2005.

If you, or someone you know is interested in participating in this vitally important program to foster innovation, education and advancement for projects within the Free Open Source community, please stop by the Summer of Code booth at CMS Expo to learn more. Steve Pignataro, CEO of Battle Creek-based corePHP will be at the CMS Expo to represent the Google Summer of Code.

About Google Summer of Code:

From the Google Summer of Code Site

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. We have worked with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 successful student participants and 2500 mentors from 98 countries worldwide, all for the love of code.

Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Learn more about Google Summer of Code here

Author John Coonen is Co-Host of the 2010 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference, to be held May 3rd, 4th and 5th, 2010 in Evanston, Illinois. Learn more at http://cmsx.us

The title of Jim Collins' bestseller, Good To Great couldn't better describe what CMS Expo is all about: Helping you and your business go from good to great. If you're part of a growing organization, it's likely you already are using web technology to your benefit.

At the end of the day, whether that technology employs any one of the CMSes we're featuring at CMS Expo really doesn't matter nearly as much as how you're applying the proper technology to work for you to achieve your business objectives. Do you have clear business goals and objectives? Can you articulate those objectives to your staff and vendor network to get them all on the same page? Are you using the right tools, the right people, and are you using them to their fullest capability?

Simply having the skills to create, produce and manage websites isn't enough; you need the insights and business savvy to know how to apply those skills, and do it in a purposeful, disciplined and orderly fashion.

I don't know about you, but the two words I despise most in business (and in life) are "good enough."  Nope, "good enough" is my starting block. Great is my finish line. Our goal at CMS Expo is to get you into the starting block with the skills, and well on your way to the finish line with our business learning sessions, as well as amazingly empowering personal connections you'll make with some of the world's best of the best in their respective fields.

From Good To Great:

"Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the reasons that we have so little that becomes great. We don't have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don't have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, precisely because it is easy to settle for a good life. The vast majority of companies never become great precisely because they become quite good. - and that is their main problem."

Going away to a conference for three days of skills training to explore the capabilities of Drupal, Joomla, WordPress or Plone is good. You'll discover all kinds of good ideas on how you can improve your web site. However, choosing to attend particular learning sessions, instructed by many of the world's top experts, to learn not only the web-building skills - but beyond that - how to apply those skills within the context of your business, non-profit, education or government application?

Now that's great; and that's what CMS Expo is all about.

John Coonen is Co-Host of the CMS Expo Learning and Business Conference, to be held May 3rd, 4th and 5th, 2010. Learn more at http://cmsx.us.

Ask yourself whether today's young generation of web users and developers in the content management world is reading up on Vignette, Autonomy, Oracle or any so-called "ECM" on CMSWire's list.

Heck, ask any twenty-something web developer whether any of those brands ring a bell. You'll get a few nods with Oracle, but let's face it, today's developers don't have much reason to care about the big boys on that ECM list these days. Welcome to the Open Source Generation.

Brand-new for 2010, we'll be hosting the first ever Meetup Monday Night. You're invited to come out Monday night, May 3rd, from 7pm - 9pm, to meet-up with other people with common interests. We've reserved five locations within walking distance of the Orrington Hotel for five different groups to meet and mingle. Here are the five interest groups meeting from 7pm - 9pm at local area eateries:

• Drupal Group
• Joomla! Group
• WordPress Group
• Plone Group
• Business Group

Think of it like a combination of a user group and business networking meeting. Locations will be announced soon. It's all unscripted, and up to group members to dictate what's on the agenda for the night. Each one of our Track Leaders will be at your service to work with you ahead of time on each group's agenda. Meetup Monday is a great night to continue the momentum and capture the energy generated at the conference that day. If you're already part of a user group or business networking group, you're free to invite all your fellow members to attend Meetup Monday on Monday night, downtown Evanston!

More to come on this soon...

John Coonen is Co-Host of the 2010 CMS Expo Learning and Business Conference, to be held May 3rd, 4th and 5th at the Hilton Orrington Hotel in Evanston, Illinois. Sign up or learn more at http://cmsx.us

CMS Expo welcomes back Plone CMS for the 2010 CMS Expo Learning and Business Conference. Last year was Plone's first year at the conference. It was a toe-in-the-water presence, with three learning sessions. At the upcoming 2010 CMS Expo, we will feature Plone with three full days of Plone!  There will be 12 full learning sessions; plus, we'll feature Plone in our CMS Evaluation Panel, and much more.

Plone, with underlying Zope and Python technologies, has quietly amassed a sizeable following world-wide, especially in the enterprise CMS sector, including many notable government, military, education and corporate installations.  Watch the CMS Expo website early next week for the full schedule, as well as bios on the entire Plone Team, coming to train on one amazingly fast, dependable and bulletproof CMS. By the way, Plone 4 Alpha is in development now! From the Plone website:

"Plone 4.0 is a new major release of Plone, which builds on the Plone 3 release series. ... A final release is to be expected in first half of 2010."

John Coonen is Co-Host of the 2010 CMS Expo Learning and Business Conference, to be held May 3rd, 4th and 5th at the Hilton Orrington Hotel in Evanston, Illinois. Sign up or learn more at http://cmsx.us

At the 2010 CMS Expo, you'll be happy to know we'll be keeping the biggest-of-the-big rooms open afternoons for CMSX Roundtables: an unconference-style meeting of the minds for all attendees. So, between learning sessions, you can pop into the Grand Ballroom to take part in one of many informal discussions going on - or make up your own and go at it! We'll be posting more on the Roundtables soon.

Also, if you're having a hard time getting away from the office for three full days, never fear! Go ahead and register because new this year, we'll have a big remote office set up for all the folks that like working from the road while they're at CMS Expo. We juiced up the broadband too. It's nailed up at near cancer-causing levels this year to ensure maximum workload capacity for anyone needing their fix. ;)

Plus, a little birdie tells me there MAY be a gameroom in the works. But I get ahead of myself. Watch for a future post on this.

The message of the day is, we've got ya un-covered with CMSX Roundtables; and we've got your work covered with our Remote Office...so sign up today for CMS Expo, May 3rd, 4th and 5th.

John Coonen is Co-Host of the 2010 CMS Expo Learning and Business Conference, to be held May 3rd, 4th and 5th at the Hilton Orrington Hotel in Evanston, Illinois. See more at http://cmsx.us

Here's a testimonial we received today from a past attendee, who's coming back this year. It's heartwarming to get feedback like this, and makes it all worthwhile for us to make this better and better every time!

"We are really looking forward to this [CMS Expo].  When I went to Denver we hadn't even started to use Joomla yet so it was a lot blank looks and confusion for me. We built our first Joomla site in March of last year...and since then have built (or are in the process of) 31 sites.  I made some contacts at the Denver expo that have been true lifesavers and really held our hand through the switchover from ExpWeb CMS to Joomla!  You guys did an amazing job and we really appreciate your effort!!!"

If "the past predicts the future," then 2010 and beyond will be another wild ride in the fast-growth CMS business sector. Today, web designers delight in having a kinder, gentler, and far more powerful website design and development tool in their repertoire than the old days of Dreamweaver and CuteFTP.

With brand-new Open Source CMSes like Joomla, Drupal or WordPress at their fingertips, along with over ten thousand commercial apps and add-ons, the web world is a better place than it was just a decade ago. Switching to a CMS-powered site is commonplace today. Functionality that once required a down-stroke of tens of thousands of dollars (or hundreds of thousands) is now virtually free.

Today, site users can quickly get past the mundane and once time-consuming set-up, and focus on the real, mission-centric work at hand: communicating their message.

So, what's the future of CMS shaping up to be? To be sure, the lines of customer relationship management (CRM), commerce and fund raising, mobile computing, security, membership development, social media and networking, blogging and message management, marketing and SEO, learning management systems (LMS) and more have all become irrevocably blurred; but one thing remains clear: the success of any web presence ultimately converges and depends clearly at the point where content happens.

That is why organizations of all sizes - from mom and pops to Coca Cola; from local municipalities to WhiteHouse.gov; from online "tuts" to Harvard University - must continue to embrace their content, and thus, their Content Management System, as mission-critical. Virtually everything flows from, to, and through the CMS today.

We all realize, the future isn't about establishing a presence; that was the last decade's challenge met. Today, it's about empowering businesses and their users to connect, communicate and engage effectively, efficiently and intelligently.

Tossing around the term "Enterprise Content Management" just doesn't have the oomph it once had, as OS CMSes continue to innovate and truly equalize business landscape faster than you can say "Vignette." That, in turn, is forcing the old stalwarts to innovate.

Social media's real-time content, entertainment distribution channels like Hulu, mobile content creators and producers, video, business conferencing and more are pushing new innovations in the CMS arena faster than ever before. Good news: CMS Expo brings them all together under one roof, to help you put it all into context, and into perspective.

Businesses, non-profits, education and government units are now far more capable of taking on a larger share of web design and development work, moving toward the "big three" web content management systems of Joomla, Drupal and WordPress.

Innovation, the maturization of Open Source itself, combined with a global economic spiral have forced a rapid, mass migration toward these three CMSes. Today, there are over 35 million instances of these powerful CMSes combined. Tens of thousands of new sites are go live - weekly.

The positive impact of CMS innovation over the past five years on the typical mid-tier business would take a thick book to describe; but to sum it up, it means they now have incredibly powerful tools at their disposal to achieve their own objectives. They also have a rather large resource pool to find the talented folks it will take to help them grown and prosper.

The future is bright for web design firms which embrace these powerful CMSes (and their add-ons).  There's no more powerful gateway to new business for an enterprising young marketer than having mastery of relevant, game-changing technology.  The successful consultancies will be the ones closely aligning themselves with their clients' business model(s). Get past the set-up mentality; there's opportunity for innovative thinkers and talented producers to focus on evaluation of apps and add-ons, customization, marketing, usability and application development and design.

CMS Future: Find Out More At CMS Expo

The future of CMS will become far more clear for those who decide to invest in their own future, and attend CMS Expo for three days in May. Learn directly from many of the top CMS developers and businesspeople. Share your insights, and make business connections with top influencers and buyers in the web world.

Along with future roadmap sessions and panels on many of the world's top CMSes, at CMS Expo, you'll have the unique chance to hear from many of the world's top add-ons and application developers, face-to face. Come be a part of this unique experience, dedicated toward providing a clear picture of the CMS industry, its challenges and its success stories. Listen, ask questions, interact and get the early look at what's to come in the CMS world.

Find out more about the 4th Annual CMS Expo, coming up this May 3rd through 5th, in Evanston, Illinois.

John Coonen is the Co-Host of the 2010 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference, and Director of the CMS Association. Registration for the 2010 CMS Expo is now open! See pricing information and sign up here.