On May 8th, 9th, and 10th, you and I have the opportunity to attend 2012 CMS Expo which is held once a year in Chicago. This event is billed as as CMS "Learning & Business" conference showcasing some of the world's leading Content Management Systems and the people who power them. Whether the CMSs featured are proprietary or open source, focused on small business or enterprise, non-profit, government or commercial applications, there’s something for everyone at CMS Expo.  

Last year, CMS Report attended the conference for the first time and we were literally blown away with the diversity of people attending the conference. Lots of people like to focus on the software and design (and that's fine), but for me content management is also about people. CMS Expo has historically been the place for CMS leaders, CMS developers, site users, and business owners to meet all under one roof. CMS Expo offers a one-of-a-kind opportunity to learn about today's leading CMSs, and get to the truth about what works, from both a vendor and a user perspective. 

There are over a dozen content management systems that will be showcased at CMS Expo. The CMSs that we are aware of include; Joomla!, Drupal, DotNetNuke, Mura, MODX, TYPO3, Sitefinity, Wondercode, Hannon Hill (Cascade Server), Liferay, Pyro, Movable Type, and Cloud CMS. We're telling you this is the conference not only to learn more about your favorite CMS but also to possibly discover your next CMS that is right for your business.

If you plan to attend, do not forget to register for CMS Expo 2012. Registration grants you FULL ACCESS to all sessions, panels, keynotes and expo hall, so you won't miss a thing. Your ticket also includes breakfast & lunch each day, plus "endless" coffee (or tea), snacks and more, plus entry to all business & social networking events.

As with last year, CMS Report is a proud media sponsor for the 2012 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference.

Hippo CMS is a Java open source web content management system that enables a true, open and context-aware content strategy. It is targeted at medium to large organisations managing content for multi-channel distribution like, web sites and intranets.

As with any Java applications and frameworks, this one is very easy to deploy to Jelastic!

Let’s get started!

A website content management system (CMS) is software used to effectively manage the content of your website. A CMS helps website administrator to ‘upload’, ‘edit’ and ‘add’ content without any knowledge of web programming. Content management systems offers a range of benefits to website administrator and due to this they are highly popular among web community.

There are many CMSs on the market but you need to select the one based on your needs. If you are going to use a CMS for the first time, we recommend you choose a user-friendly CMS that does not add any kind of complexity on your part.

What follows is a list of what I believe to be the seven best web content management systems for novices:

WordPress

If you are a small business or a blogger, WordPress is an ideal choice for you. WordPress CMS software is developed by hundreds of community members and it includes a number of themes and plug-ins for appealing and effective website design.

Joomla

Joomla CMS is widely used in web applications as well as website development. Due to its user-friendliness and flexibility, it is amongst the most popular CMS on the market today. Joomla CMS is open source software thus available for free download to all.

Drupal

Drupal is open source website CMS software and It is used to create a wide verities of sites from a small scale personal blogging websites to large-scale community websites.

Liferay Sync synchronizes content across mobile, desktop, and web

LOS ANGELES — (February 1, 2012) — Liferay, Inc., provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class open source portal, announced today the availability of Liferay Sync, a powerful document-sharing add-on to the Community Edition (CE) of Liferay Portal 6.1. Liferay Sync transforms the Liferay platform into a central, easy-to-use document sharing service.

"There are people who can call a blog as their business. In this case, their revenue is mainly from ad sales on their blog. But, that is not a very sustainable or long term business approach you should have. Your online business must solve a person’s problem."

- Marieke Hensel, Why Blogging is Not a Viable Business Mode", Branding Personality, January 30, 2012

2012 may indeed be the “Year of Web Content.” Actually, so was 2011, 2010, 2009…  But this article on the Forbes Marketwatch blog describes how some big brands are attacking content marketing and content curation to help fulfill their brand promise.

Amongst content management insiders, there has been an ongoing acronym war over what the technology systems should be called that help companies manage their content online -- which quite frankly, end users care very little about.

With a smile on his face, Scott Liewehr sent me a tweet the other day letting me know that he briefly plugged my name while co-hosting CMS-Connected. CMS-Connected is a 60-minute monthly news show, streamed live on the TPN Network with a focus on the web content management industry and includes CMS related news and commentary from leading CMS expert analysts and participating guests. It's a very good video production and well worth your viewing time if you have any interest in content management.

As we discussed a few weeks ago, the release of Joomla 2.5 on this day was expected.  Surpringly, knowing the release date seemed to make the wait longer. Without a doubt, Joomla.org will be a busy place the next few days. Joomla's marketing people tell me that Joomla! has been downloaded more than 28 million times and powers more than 1.6 million. Those are pretty significant numbers and this new version of Joomla! is expected to help continue the popularity of this open source CMS.

As I discussed in my previous articles, Joomla! for the first time includes multi-database functionality, beginning with Microsoft SQL. If you read the article, you also know that Joomla 2.5 also includes more than a dozen new features. You'll can also check out those features by going to https://www.joomla.org/core-features.html . But before you hop over to another site, you can find some additional details about Joomla 2.5 right now in this exclusive press release that we've acquired from sources secretly embedded in the Joomla! community.