A couple years ago, my wife and I took advantage of the post-housing bubble low interest rates and upgraded to a larger home. We came across a pre-owned house built in 2006 that came with the price, size, and style that just screamed to us "buy me".  As a family, we carefully reviewed our finances and listed our pros and cons before making the purchase. My wife and I were excited to finally have a bathroom connected to the master bedroom. Our then young son was excited that he finally had a family room that offered him fun and adventure. Secretly though, what sold me on the house had nothing to do with these things. What impressed me most was that this house had a network distribution panel.

Early this morning, I was one of two guests on the eZ Publish Show. The purpose of the episode was to discuss the future of content management system. I was joined by host Ivo Lukač of Netgen, and fellow guest Apoorv Durga from Real Story Group.

On my "to-do list" is a mention of the availability of my In the Spotlight segment online as well as the rest of the May 2013 CMS-Connected show. One of the nice things about participating on this show with hosts Tyler Pyburn and Scott Liewehr is the chance to get to spread my wings to new CMS territory. Specific to this show, I had the opportunity to review Bridgeline Digital's iAPPS Product Suite for the very first time. Once I had a chance to get a demo and do some homework, I found I was quite impressed with this content management platform. Those of you from medium to large size organizations will especially want to take a look at iAPPS. 

At the 2013 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference I have the privilege of moderating a panel focused on the Cloud. That's actually a broad topic, but I think it's a topic that is increasingly becoming well understood by the CMS community. Last year, I moderated a similar panel and, in my opinion, we spent way too much time trying to define the Cloud. This year, I'm hoping we're past the "what is it" phase and spend much more time talking about real problems, real benefits, and the challenges the content management industry may be facing by moving toward a Cloud solution.

The recording video of the March 26th CMS-Connected show is now available online. CMS-Connected is a monthly webcast featuring news, trends and commentary related to the content management industry. In this particular show the focus was on mobile and social eCommerce with much of that discussion including Gabe Sumner from Sitefinity. I also participated as a guest on the show discussing my impressions of MODX  during the "In the Spotlight" segment. Hosts Tyler Pyburn and Scott Liewehr of course are present throughout the show reporting and commenting about the latest happenings in content management and content management systems.

Sitting on my desktop the past few weeks has been an eBook from the Aluent Group, Drupal and Joomla!: A Comparison of Project Processes and Costs. I probably would have not read this eBook if it wasn't for an acquaintance of mine, Justin Kerr, letting me know that he was a co-author of the book. I'm lucky to have read the book because I think Justin Kerr as well as co-authors Robert Nowak and Jet Pixel have hit a home run in their review and comparison of Drupal and Joomla.

A few days ago, WordPress 3.5 was released and I originally planned to write the typical "what is new in WordPress" article similar to what I've done in the past for CMS Report. However, I thought this time around I would also discuss how I'm using WordPress to support the website of one of my favorite photographers, Karen Ruby of Dakota Imagery. Certainly, in this article there is no cause for you to suspect my opinions are biased with regard to her photography skills despite the fact we've been married for 11 years and she is the mother of my child. In this article, my goal is to not only provide WordPress and CMS users something interesting to read but also to point photographers to a WordPress package that my wife and I have found works quite nicely to support her photography business.

I do not know when it exactly happened, but a number of years ago I decided to become a pacifist. I am a pacifist that is in the war of open source versus proprietary. In my opinion, the debate over licensing and software development processes is only mildly interesting as it is the quality of the end product that matters to me most. I walk the fine line of being an advocate for open source and a defender of proprietary software. Admittedly I've confused a lot of people that have chosen to take sides in this war. However, there is always room for reasonable civil discussions of any topic when new data and new perspective is given.