Apartment towers and shops in downtown Evanston. Photo: Eric Fredericks from Rancho Cordova, CA, United States / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Web developers, editors and marketing staff who manage websites for a living were due in downtown Evanston the week of May 14, 2013, for CMS Expo, a three-day conference on content management systems held at the Orrington Hotel.
The event was no newcomer to the city. Organizers held the 2011 edition at the same hotel, then the Hilton Orrington, a block from Northwestern University’s campus, and the conference has carried the Evanston address for several years running. The 2013 program ran May 14 to 16.
What was on the program
Billed as a learning and business conference, CMS Expo put several competing publishing platforms under one roof. Organizers listed Drupal, Jahia, Joomla, OpenText, SageFrame and WordPress among the systems on show. Those are the tools that let a school, a hospital or a small retailer update a website without writing code each time, and attendees typically arrive trying to choose one, migrate to another or get more from the one they already run.
According to coverage ahead of the conference, the 2013 edition leaned less on the mechanics of the software and more on the content that runs through it: who writes it, how it is organized and what it is supposed to accomplish for a business. Robert Rose and Scott Liewehr of the research firm Digital Clarity Group were among the speakers announced.
Organizers of the Drupal open-source community also posted a Monday-night meetup tied to the conference, giving users of that platform an informal evening session ahead of the formal program. Digital Clarity Group posted a notice that its analysts would be at the conference.
A Northwestern presentation
A local institution had a seat at the table. Harlan Wallach of Northwestern University Information Technology wrote on a university IT blog that he would travel to the Orrington to present a talk titled, in full, Using Drupal in Higher Education: A Flexible Tool in a Mixed CMS Environment. The title reflects a common reality on large campuses, where no single platform serves every department and several systems end up running side by side.
Sources: Digital Clarity Group, Northwestern University Information Technology blog, CMS Report.
Daniel Okafor covers business, startups and the Innovators section for The Evanston Edge.
