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Hangin’ around the Switzerland area this September? Be sure to mosey on over to the Magnolia Conference for an open source good time.  

The conference, held in Basel, Switzerland, will consist of keynotes and sessions with business and technical topics in regard to Magnolia CMS (news, site). Speakers include Pascal Mongold and Boris Kraft, Magnolia's CEO and CTO, respectively. Additionally, some folks from Day Software, Aperto, and several other companies and institutions are scheduled to make an appearance as well. The whole shebang will then close with an "Unconference-style" event run by the attendees.

Here's a closer look at the schedule:

Presentation Day, September 10th

During Presentation Day, participants of Magnolia Conference will gain the knowledge they need to build simple open source content management solutions with Magnolia CMS through expert instruction, hands-on tutorials and case studies.

Community Day, September 11th

Community Day will be an Unconference. This means that attendees themselves will be responsible to propose talks, vote for talks, present, share, question, inquire and otherwise make the event.

For more information on the event, including a detailed schedule of speakers, head on over here. If you aren't going to be anywhere near Switzerland but would still like to get out and shake some hands, check out our complete list of events for something a little closer to home. 

Forget Paris in the spring. Do it in the Fall this year, particularly if you are involved, interested or even vaguely curious about open source software.

That's because in October, the second Open World Forum with the Open Source Think Tank will take place in Paris and bring together the key global players in the Free, Libre and Open Software (FLOSS) community.

Conceived as a ‘meeting point’ where industry movers-and-shakers, community leaders, politicos and CIOs could all bang their collective heads together, this year’s event will focus on FLOSS as one of the key drivers in the development of the digital industry.

At the tail end of this year’s Gilbane conference was a topic that, no matter which industry you’re in, should be at the top of your list of priorities: Delivering Customer Experience in Challenging Times. Or, as we like to put it, How to Keep Getting Money out of Penny-Pinching People.

Moderating the panel was Leonor Ciarlone a Lead Analyst in Content Globalization at Gilbane Group, and speakers were Nic McMahon, VP Global Technology Solutions, Lionbridge and Natasja Paulssen, a partner at Ordina Consulting.

It should come as no surprise to you that one of the keys to the value of Web content is the ability for people to find it. But how to enable that is the question. Yesterday afternoon at Gilbane SF, Bill Rogers, CEO, Ektron, and Christian Burne of Oshyn, spoke to this topic during a presentation about optimizing SEO.

Moderator Tony White, Lead Analyst, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group, opened the discussion by asking the audience, “What sorts of things are you doing to optimize search on your site?”

The response? Just the lonely sound of crickets chirping.

Back with more advice from Gilbane SF! In case Seth Gottlieb’s talk on how to select a CMS yesterday didn’t leave you feeling brave enough to take on the sea of solutions, we have another option: Let someone else pick it for you.

Today’s onstage tag team for the timid consisted of Tony White, Lead Analyst, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group, and Scott Liewehr, Strategy Practice Lead, Onesta. White began the presentation by explaining in detail his own personal process for matching vendors with clients, and Liewehr held up the end with a discussion about defining needs before solutions, rather than vice versa — something many of us are guilty of.

The Gilbane conference is about content management, of course. But this year, it’s apparently also all about the people. Frank Gilbane made a quick appearance this morning to acknowledge the people. The facts: This year‘s audience represents 16 different countries and a variety of different industries; a melting pot of people.

Kicking us off from this new angle as the first keynote speaker was Kumar Vora, vice president and general manager of Enterprise, Adobe (news, site).

Social media. This particular phenomenon is arguably the biggest thing on the Web right now, and it’s getting bigger every day. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine being active on the Web without somehow participating in social media.

But, on the off chance that you’ve completely missed the social media bus and you’re scrambling to figure out exactly why it’s taking the Web by storm, take solace in knowing that you’re not alone. John Stone of Crosstech Partners held a workshop at this year’s Gilbane SF Conference to explain the bare bone basics.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we cover tons of solutions every day. In fact, Seth Gottlieb, founder of Content Here says there are somewhere between 1,700 and 2,000 products out there that call themselves content management systems, so options certainly aren’t the problem. But how exactly to select one? There’s a pressing issue.

Today’s guidance comes directly from Gottlieb, who today held a workshop at this year’s Gilbane San Francisco conference in hopes to teach us all exactly how to find our perfect Web CMS match. And trust us, it’s not as scary of a process as it may seem. Rather than provide ultimate or magic answers, Gottlieb's refreshing words heavily focused on getting back to the basics.

This year's Gilbane SF started with a day of pre-conference workshops. In one of them — Managing the Web: The Fundamentals of Web Operations Management — Lisa Welchman, founding partner of WelchmanPierpoint, discussed the challenges faced by today's web teams.

"Web managers tend to have the world wide web on their shoulders," said Welchman, emphasizing the enormity of complexities that go into web operations management. If web operations management is not done right, one of the outcomes is poor web experience, resulting in lost revenue. But there are ways to make your web operations efficient and successful.

We're in the final stretch before Gilbane conference kick-off next week in San Francisco. If you’re still not registered, save some money (US$ 200) by using the CMSWIRE code.

For all of you who we will see in a few days, here are some of the happenings that are not to be missed.

As the community manager for Alfresco (news, site), I interact in a variety of ways with our members but most of the time our conversations take place over the great expanse of the “Interweb”.  It is, therefore, a great pleasure to see faces, shake hands, and listen to what our community has to say at our meetup events.

Bob Boiko and Erik Hartman are at the J Boye Conference in Philadelphia and they want webmasters, knowledge managers and anyone and everyone who works with information to step up and think of themselves as information managers — and tell everybody.

An open expert roundtable at the J. Boye conference. Panelists included Lisa Welchman, Welchman Pierpoint; Tony Byrne, founder of CMS Watch; Martin White, principal of Intranet Focus; and moderator and conference host Janus Boye.

Here's a quick review of the discussion held at the roundtable.

David Pogue, tech columnist for the New York Times, shares his viewpoint at the J Boye Conference on three tech trends that are likely to make a difference in the next few years.

Bob Boiko, author of Laughing at the CIO and a speaker at the 2009 J. Boye conference in Philadelphia, advises information managers to get comfortable with saying no. You don't do it by practicing in front of a mirror, even if you're shy. Instead, you practice laying the groundwork to justify the no. In the process, you'll make better decisions and work with more effective people.

When SharePoint first came to market it was called an Enterprise Content Management System. Since then, its actual use has varied widely. Many say it's not a complete ECM platform because it lacks a number of important Enterprise CMS capabilities.

ECM provider Open Text (news, site) has built a strong partnership relationship with Redmond. Drawing upon that and broad field experience their latest analysis aims to separate fact from fiction.

Bill Tomczak of Grumpy Engineering gave a talk on Database basics for CMS at the CMS Expo. Those of us who admin multiple CMS sites know eventually you have to dig into a table or two to keep sites running happily. Bill provided an interesting history of relational databases (see Edgar_Codd), provided some basic database concepts and introduced a couple good database manager tools for the non-geniuses among us.

Rafael Corral of CorePHP just gave a talk on a new Joomla component that integrates WordPress within Joomla at the CMS Expo. Is this the integration that can turn Joomla into the power blog that it always promised (but never quite managed to be?)

I finally got to drop in on CMS Expo. The brainchild of Linda and John Coonen (they have done an amazing job) it is a smorgasbord of CMS buzz, chat and the lunch wasn't bad either. A couple sessions were especially interesting this afternoon.

As a Joomla lover I thought I would check out the competition so visited Colleen Carroll and a session on Drupal design.

Colleen emphasized that using a grid to build Drupal themes always renders a better end product.

She worked with her own theme she has modified from Zen available at drupal.org/project/austin.

Tip: Colleen says to activate css compressor during development (in configuration) to speed dev time.

I found the Drupal community contribution feature interesting and wonder if other CMS should adopt it.

Familiar to us Joomla users, Colleen advised not to hack Drupal core if possible, as updates will wipe away your hacks.

Colleen showed us that good theme development is as much about deconstruction as building. A fitting philosophy for a self professed lover of Zen.

Drupal update rumor: Colleen says she has heard it through the grapevine that Drupal 7 the theming on Drupal.org's redesign should be released by September 09.

[Editor's Note: Colleen has pointed out a correction on the Drupal update rumor, saying the September timing was related to the theming on Drupal.org's redesign and not the Drupal 7 release. ]