Christian Web Resources

Here we are at the beginning of day 2 of CMS Expo. David and I have been here since Monday afternoon in preparation for the show that started yesterday. With over 400 attendees registered for over 80 sessions and speakers, we are hoping to meet a few more administrators, developers, users and technology partners for ImpressCMS.The bulk of day 1 was focused on panel discussions for specific vertical markets - non-profits, government, education, small- and medium-sized businesses, and corporati...

In 2010, I attended the first US conference with ImpressCMS - CMS Expo. I knew this was I place and an event I wanted to go back to, but we made sure to try out a few other conferences after that.Now, 2 years later, ImpressCMS is going to be a Silver Sponsor for the 2012 CMS Expo in Chicago!

Wow! The reality of our history just sank in - ImpressCMS is about to enter its 5th year! There have been 4 major releases and 12 other final releases during that time, along with all the alpha, beta and release candidates in between. With the release of ImpressCMS 1.3, we have embarked on an entirely different path, one where we have begun to unload all the additional weight of (poorly structured) legacy code. When Marc_André and I were planning for the 1.3 release, it became clear we did...

As we settle into our new environs on Assembla, it would be good to invest a little time in getting ourselves acquainted with the layout and features, but also to establish some practices that will serve us well, no matter where we manage our code and development.First of all, we still value everyone's contributions - designes, graphics, news, tutorials, themes, modules, help in the forums, site maintenance and core development. ImpressCMS has long had a strong commitment to open source and t...

Each year since the launch of ImpressCMS, we have monitored the opensource marketplace to pick up trends, refine our top features and gauge our progress. water&stone, a digital agency that promotes and uses opensource content management systems for their clients, has been conducting surveys since 2008 of what they view as the Top 20 opensource content management systems available. Once again, they are conducting this open survey.ImpressCMS did not get listed or even mentioned in the f...

With ImpressCMS 1.3 Final due by the end of September, some of your may not have picked up on what is on the horizon for 1.4, yet. Time for the discussions to turn to how to make ImpressCMS 1.4  a reality.When 1.3 was launched, it seemed rather simple in scope and definition, but it really was much more than it appeared. It was our first major step in changing our thinking about the development of ImpressCMS and looking at ourselves with a fresh perspective. Changing technology forces us to...

So, if we're going to try to lower the barriers, we need to know which barriers to lower - right? There have been some great comments, forum posts and email exchanges about what comes after ImpressCMS 1.3. The biggest challenge we face is putting all this into action and getting some things accomplished, wouldn't you say?If you haven't read the earlier posts, I suggest you take some time to do so - the background is significant and so is how we think about our future. Here are the links -Blog...

Barriers tend to create stress. People get frustrated and discouraged, some may even get angry or hostile. Not all tension is bad, though. Your heart beats because its muscles tense and relax. And, the Akashi-Kaikyō bridge, pictured above, is another example of how tension is used to span a very large gap. Without tension, the bridge would collapse. Without tension, your heart would stop beating.

In my last post, I presented an idea for taking ImpressCMS to the next stage of its life and introduced the principal of "Lowering the Barriers". As promised, I'm going to dive deeper into this over the next few posts, just to shed a little more light on this. First, a little video.

As we are nearing the final stages for ImpressCMS 1.3, it's about time to have a look ahead to the next stage of life for the project. These last 18 months of work on the core have gone on quite a bit more than I ever anticipated - it seems that Smaller! Faster! Better! was bigger and took longer to get better. But, now we are here - where do we go next?All along, ImpressCMS has been using phrases like "Open source, open development, open philosohpy and open community." We made some amazing p...