What I've learned

As you might have noticed, I haven't been blogging so much lately. It's because I've been very busy researching and helping to write the upcoming Open Source CMS review that Idealware is going to publish.

I've learned a lot about each of the four systems that we reviewed, and you'll hear all about that soon, but for now, I thought I'd share a little of the over all wisdom that has come from working on this report.

• Maintaining a CMS is hard work. Way back when, I was the lead developer on a now-dead open source CMS, so I know intimately what hard work it takes to write one. But I didn't realize how much work it takes, by how many tens and hundreds and thousands of people, to maintain a world-class CMS.
• Communities count. Piggy-backing on the above - it is the communities that make these four systems what they are.
  
• Different people have different assumptions about what is the right way to do things. One of the big challenges of writing the review was figuring out how to review these based on equivalent criteria, when each system was actually trying to solve the CMS problem in their own, completely valid, but somewhat different, way.
• We are lucky. We are really lucky (well, it probably isn't totally luck) that these open source systems (and others) have emerged, and are able to finally get nonprofits out of the "the executive director's nephew designed the site and we can't put up that event announcement because he went snowboarding" problem in a way that is cost-effective for them.