Two days ago, I wrote a post on the ICT-KM blog on choosing an open source cms and the simple and practical way I went about evaluating different CMS solutions.

What has emerged is a discussion (and even a bit of debate) via the post comments from IT managers, information and knowledge managers.

Join the discussion on WordPress vs Drupal: Choosing an Open Source CMS!

Besides my role with NetSquared globally, I also organize a monthly NetSquared event locally, in Cambridge, UK. The July Net2Camb event was led by Will Hall, a PHP web developer and open source enthusiast. He discussed the options, benefits, and risks associated with using open source content management systems for SMEs, charities and NGOs.

Will has kindly written a wrap-up of the event to share with you, and included his presentation slides for your reference:

Our users can communicate with one another, which is great, but quite often as an administrator the need may arise for us to communicate with a user or users on our site. It may be to remind them about the web site or to inform active users about new changes to the site, which they may not have been made aware of.

This article is extracted from the "Drupal 6 Social Networking" book. In this article, you will learn:

Plone Bootcamp Series in April 

Joel Burton, Plone teacher galore and frequent presented at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in the US and abroad, has begun announcing dates for his Plone Bootcamps series. The class, a fantastic introduction to the Plone open-source CMS platform, will be held in San Francisco the week before NTC in San Francisco this April:

Brett Meyer, NTEN's Communications and Web Manager, asked me to ask all of you to take a moment to fill out their CMS Satisfaction Survey. The survey has 14 questions and will take about 5-10 minutes to complete.

Wondering what CMS is, or if the one you are using is on the survey? Here's what NTEN says:

" CMS Defined

Hi all, awhile ago you may remember me griping about the ineffectiveness of Facebook Groups and Pages. They are easy to set up, but they are also quite limited in functionality. These features are not conducive to community-building, engagement or organizing.

Today, I'm releasing the first beta of a new open source Facebook Newsroom CMS application framework.

See the demonstration application site at Facebook:
http://apps.facebook.com/newsdemo

In February 2006, members of the Net2 Community were asked, "What emerging tech tool do you think has the most potential to help nonprofits and NGOs create social change?"

Here were the results, ranked in order of preference:

- Content Management Systems, 29.41%
- Social networking, 29.41%
- Podcasting, 11.76%
- RSS (publishing information to an RSS/XML feed), 11.76%
- Blogging, 5.88%
- Cell phones/SMS, 5.88%
- Social bookmarking (e.g. del.icio.us, Furl), 5.88%
- Aggregation (republishing content from RSS feeds), 0.00%
- Tagging, 0.00%
- Wikis, 0.00%
- Other (posted here

A year and 8 months later, do you still think social networking and CMS can create the greatest impact for nonprofits?

Seems like social networking, in particular, is starting to reach its peak.

Chris Messina discussed some possible solutions to social networking fatigue in his post, Stop Building Social Networks.

Location

Sometime last year I did a little reasearch into what some of these packages had to offer. I had several contstraints, wanting something compatible with the ASP & SQLServer platform I used as a business software developer, the appearance of a website rather than a blog and relative ease of construction.

Many of the packages were quite complex in the context of creating content and allocating permissions and in the end DotNetNuke seemed to satisfy most of my needs.

Most of them had a developer community doing interesting things with opensource and value added additions but when it came to collaboration in building content, there is still a little to be desired. I didn't get around to trying Drupal.

After quite a lot of work,my consulting company, working with The Cedar Cultural Center, just released a revamped web site. (August 23) The new site features music and video, a searchable calendar, and quite a lot more.

The Cedar is a well-established nonprofit music venue in Minneapolis, and features world music, roots music, and lots of other entertainers who are not supported by the major music industry. 

The site is based on Drupal with quite a few stock and custom modules.  There was a lot of collaborative work involved between my company and The Cedar.