• How to Resolve Your Open Content Management Quandary

  After years of development and competition, open source content management systems (CMS) have proliferated and are very powerful tools for building, deploying and managing web sites, blogs and more. You're probably familiar with some of the big names in this arena, including Drupal (which Ostatic is based on) and Joomla.

  As we noted in this post, selecting a CMS to build around can be a complicated process, since the publishing tools provided are hardly the only issue. The good news is that free, sophisticated guides for evaluating CMS systems have flourished. There are even good options for trying open CMS systems online before you choose one. Here, in this newly updated post, you'll find some very good resources.

  he first thing to pursue as you evaluate CMS systems to deploy, including the many free, good platforms, is an overview of what is available. CMSMatrix.org is a great site for plotting out side-by-side comparisons of what CMS systems have to offer. In fact, it lets you compare the features in over 1200 content management system products. Definitely take a look. This site also has a good overview of the options.

• Postleaf is an open-source blogging platform for the design-conscious

  Content management systems are boring until you have to use one. You can install a little Drupal or WordPress, pick up some Squarespace, or just dump to Medium, the graveyard for posts about protein shakes and VC funding. But what if you could roll your own CMS? And what if you made it really cool?

  That’s what Cory LaViska did. LaViska is the founder of SurrealCMS and has been making it easy to edit stuff on the web for nine years. Rather than build and sell an acceptable CMS, however, he took all of his best ideas and made a far better CMS. And he made it open source and called it Postleaf.

I started using Drupal because I needed an open source content management system (CMS) to use in several community projects. One of the projects I was involved with was just getting started and had narrowed its CMS selection down to either Drupal or Joomla. At the time I was using a different framework, but I had considered Drupal in the past and knew that I liked it a lot better than Joomla. I convinced them to go with the new Drupal 6 release and converted all of my other projects for consistency. I started working with Drush because I wanted a unified mechanism to work with local and remote sites. My first major contribution to Drush was site aliases and sql-sync in Drush 3.

Back in the day, I was working at a large nonprofit in the "webmaster's office" of the marketing department and was churning out custom PHP/MySQL forms like nobody's business. I finally got weary of that and starting hunting around the web for a better way. I found Drupal 6 and starting diving in on my own. Years later, after a career shift and a move, I discovered the Portland Drupal User Group and landed a job as a full-time Drupal developer. I continued to regularly attend the meetups in Portland, which I found to be a great source of community, friendships, and professional development. Eventually, I landed a job with Lullabot as a trainer creating content for Drupalize.Me. Now, I'm managing the Drupalize.Me content pipeline, creating Drupal 8 content, and am very much involved in the Portland Drupal community. I'm this year's coordinator, finding and scheduling speakers.

Max Bronsema is the chief architect and director of web communication technologies for Western Washington University (WWU) in Bellingham, Washington. Previously, he was the lead Drupal architect at the university, leading a small student team developing innovative Drupal solutions for the public-facing sites at WWU.