A couple weeks ago, Liferay's marketing and communication folks sent me an email mentioning that Liferay was included as a "Leader" in Gartner's 2011 Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals. After my usual procrastination I finally got around to reading the report and what follows in this blog post are some impressions that jumped at me while reading the report. I'm not convinced the randomness of these personal thoughts make up a blog post (at least a well-written blog post) but I'm going for it since my public note taking often turns out better than a well polished article.

As I mentioned last month, this week the 2011 Liferay West Coast Symposium takes place. I'm excited to attend this conference as when it comes to Liferay, I'm definitely a newbie and this is a great opportunity for CMS Report to focus and learn more about Liferay. During this conference, Liferay is scheduled to announce the details for Liferay Portal 6.1 as well as their new Marketplace. I'm really interested to see how the Liferay community responds to the anticipated new features as well as their participation and role in interacting with the developers.

When my wife has "book club" with her friends, my son and I often go out for some Famous Dave Ribs. For the first time, Logan decided to skip the kids menu and join me in eating this full slab of ribs.

One of the coolest things about CMS Expo 2011 was the opportunity to see five open source CMS "founders" together in one room. On the conference stage were Dries Buytaert (Drupal), Andrew Eddie (Joomla), Sigurd Magnusson (SilverStripe), Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke), and Per Ploug-Hansen (Umbraco).

Most people in the content management world will acknowledge that seeing these five guys together in the same room is a rare event. What you may not know is that for many of these open source leaders this event was the first time they have ever met one another.

I'm sitting in a CMS Expo session on search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the descriptive term used by marketers to describe the process of luring traffic to your site by improving your position in search engine indexes.

Believe it or not, this is the first time that I've ever sat on any type of SEO discussion. I"ve just never worried about it as good content on a niche site like mine seems to already do well.  Evidently, that's not the case for all sites. Perhaps, I'm also lucky in that I have a lot of SEO already built into my site by using a CMS such as Drupal that tries to stick with standards. It probably doesn't hurt that I also have keywords such as "cms", "report",  "content management", and "Ruby" already baked into the site.

It was five years ago that I posted in programmer tradition at CMS Report, "hello world". At the time, I expected CMSReport.com to be around for only a couple years which was more than enough time for it to fulfill my purpose. At the time, I had an academic interest in information systems and found that Web-based content management systems were a nice way to put theoretical ideas into practical know-how. This site focused on content management systems in hopes of meeting the few other people out there that shared my interests in CMS.

In that first post, I actually wrote more than "hello world". The full title of the article was "Hello World, New Version". The phrase "new version" was in reference to CMSReport.com not being the first site I created to focus on the CMS.  A couple years earlier, I had tried to start up a website called WebCMS Forum. The online forum was intended to be a "place for those with a passion for web-based applications such as portals, blogs, and forums". I spent a lot of time and money on that site, but in the end few visitors joined in as members to talk about content management systems with me. If Twitter had existed back then I would have easily tweeted "WebCMS Forum RIP #failed".

Looking back at it now, I'm convinced CMS Report is a success because of my experience from failing so miserably with WebCMS Forum. Previously, I had tried to build a site for others to express their passion and obsession for their favorite content management systems. Here at CMSReport.com, I took the opposite approach and built the site for the sole purpose to talk about my passion for content management systems. It was a crazy idea to put my opinions at the center of CMS discussions as even now I do not consider myself an expert in content management systems. It was only by circumstance that I later realized people are attracted to other passionate people that ask questions and are willing to go at great lengths to find the answers. If you're looking for the facts you go to Wikipedia but if you're also looking for great discussion from people asking the same questions as you are; it is the blogs you seek.

My eight year old son calls this artwork Meaning of Shapes. He used the Microsoft Paint program found on Windows XP.

A couple weeks ago my family spent some vacation time at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. If you have ever been to a Disney theme park then you know full well that it takes a lot of work in those parks just to have fun. Some of the most popular rides in these parks have waiting periods of up to two hours due to the long lines of people wanting to get on board. Luckily, my wife brought a Disney tourist guidebook that gave our family the helpful hints, recommendations, and information we needed to beat those long lines.  In the end, we ended up with a very enjoyable trip (so enjoyable that we got to ride Space Mountain twice!). That travel guide was a valuable asset to my family's vacation.