CMSWire Interviews

User research works best when you match your participants to the people who will use your designs. It makes sense that teams would try to use the demographics, often compiled by the organization's market research team, as the basis of their recruiting efforts. However, this can be problematic.

Dee-Ann LeBlanc talks with Barrie North about his latest book and video on the Joomla! content-management system, and the three core things that people new to Joomla! need to know.

eZ Systems is turning 10 this year -- a notable achievement in the open source content management world. And with the upcoming eZ Conference and Awards in Paris this June, we figured it was an opportune moment to have a chat with the eZ Systems folks and see just how the commercial open source world works, from their perspective.

In a year that has seen falling revenues across the technology field, the content management sector has witnessed healthy returns as some companies report earnings and market growth.

FatWire is one of those companies. The web content management vendor recently reported a solid 2008 fiscal year. With 40% year-over-year growth, strong international demand and a bevy of new customers, FatWire must be doing something right.

We recently interviewed CEO Yogesh Gupta to find out about FatWire's methods and get opinions on the web content management market as a whole.

During economic times like these, most companies are looking to cut costs rather than invest in the newest trends in technology. Vignette is an organization that has had its share of tough times, but those setbacks are not keeping the leadership of the company from dedicating one of their most talented resources to the booming world of social media.

eZ Systems is on the cusp of launching a Software-as-a-Service offering for its media-oriented Web CMS, eZ Publish. We covered the original news here, and as promised, we spoke with eZ’s global partner manager Bertrand Maugain to get more insight into the new eZ Publish SaaS offering and their partner in arms, Mamut ASA.

Feed.us has taken a shot at the content management market and one that strikes a distinctly different approach to solving the typical problems with light-weight publishing. Via the combination of software-as-a-service (SaaS), XML data transformation and flexible input and output APIs, Feed.us thinks they’ve carved a foothold in the market. If they’ve played the cards right, it could be one that’s going to make life easier for a whole lot of folks.

Come along for the ride as we spent some time in the mind of Feed.us co-founder, Rick Stratton.

They know their onions at the Crunchies, alright. From 2007’s plentiful harvest of genuinely inspiring startups, Zoho was picked as the ‘Best Enterprise Startup’ of the year. If you’re already a user, this is not likely to surprise you at all.

We at CMSWire had the chance to speak with Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna and he gave us the full organizational down-low: vision, growth, customers, future, past and present. And, of course, Google.

Our conversation was long and wide-ranging; a verbatim transcript would take you, dear reader, all morning to read. So it’s been distilled so that you can get a feel for Zoho from top to bottom without having to take a half-day.

Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert has had a productive year, even by his standards. He wrapped up his PhD, became a father, started a company (Acquia) with Jay Batson, and, oh yeah, continued to steer the good ship Drupal towards modular, multi-user Web CMS heaven.

We caught up with the man just before Christmas, and collared him for a quick chat about Acquia, Drupal and OSS.

CMSWire had a chance to speak with the Russian media company who just acquired LiveJournal from San Francisco-based Six Apart.

Edward Shenderovich is the Director of Strategy for Moscow-based SUP (pronounced “soup” in English). Edward comes from a recent history with Web CMS vendor Quantum Art, and from social networking project Dandelife.

Today he walks through the recent history of the SUP / Six Apart partnership, the future of LiveJournal, and discusses some of the controversy which has been bubbling in the blogosphere ever since SUP first partnered with Six Apart.

Programming and software development is a thankless task, and you need all the help you can get, right?

Rubbish. You get paid a fortune and can stroll in at midday in a ZZ Top beard and pyjamas, and nobody in a suit ever talks to you because they have no idea what you actually do.

What the suits should do, of course, is ship you all off to a military barber for a #1, and then off to Qatar for six weeks of basic military training. That’d take the wind out of your sails. And while you’re at it, stop off in Hong Kong on the way back for some tailored suits. It wouldn’t kill you to look respectable once in a while.

Life is far too easy for you developers. Unfortunately, if you are in the business of coding for the Vignette suite of Enterprise CMS (and other) products, it’s just gotten even easier.

Back in the bad old days, when you sent an email somewhere containing some vital, time sensitive information, you just assumed that it got there, and that it would not ‘conveniently’ get lost or delayed somewhere along the line.

Yes, you laugh, but it’s true.

When you sent a registered or notarized letter through either the mail or a courier service, you only certified the damn envelope, and not what was in it. Back in the day, you could send someone a contract to sign, and they could send it back to you with a crucial page missing, and claim that that page in question was not included in the original document. And then you might find yourself in a good old-fashioned mess.

For you, that day might have been today. But, at the risk of sounding like a corny advert, maybe tomorrow will be different.

Dries Buytaert, founder of the wildly popular Drupal Open Source Web CMS was recently interviewed on internetnews.com by Sean Michael Kerner.