March 2009

(This post is in reply to one that Dries Buytaert wrote on OStatic.com)

I agree with Dries that Open Source CMS' are putting more power into the hands of people who may not know or want to learn code, and that as their learning curves get less steep we will see more people jumping into creating and growing their websites themselves; depending on the type of website they want to have.

We've of course seen the *huge* acceptance of wordpress for simple content publishing (read: 'blogging') amongst all sorts of people ranging from tech pros to near-luddites.  As people use more websites that have richer feature sets everyday they'll no doubt want to see the functionality of those sites in their own; for a while yet, though it may not require custom coding, I think the role of 'web master' or 'web developer' or whatever-you-want-to-call-them will be around for quite some time.

That role will continue to exist but may change to focus on conceptualizing the end result and making it happen with the right combination (and configuration) of 3rd party modules/extensions; whether through just hand-holding/teaching people wanting to develop their own sites or actually putting the pieces together themselves.

I'm really excited for Mark Boulton's redesign of Drupal 7; right now a major hindrance to non-technical people using Drupal is its stratified admin interface, which often leads to developers custom-creating UX per-project to suit each client's administrative needs.

To help people jump-start their web projects we've taken a hard look at another Open Source CMS called Joomla for example, and come up with a packaged solution called Seedling (http://www.plantseedling.com).

Seedling's distribution of Joomla is cool because it comes pre-configured and loaded with a suite of extensions and easily changeable theme; so people can develop their web projects a lot quicker and with more power under the hood.  Plus, it comes with optional email/ticket support - so new adopters of Joomla can get help when they need it.

Until core installs of Open Source CMS' are a lot more user friendly I think solutions like Seedling will really help bridge the gap for those folks who want to learn via DIY and/or can't afford the services of web developers.

We just recently flipped the switch on a new online shop for our friends at JUMA - one of the premier Canadian fashion houses.

JUMA now sells pieces from their current and past collections for men and women through a storefront completely integrated with their Joomla-powered website (which we designed and developed for them back in 2007).

See it in action (and go buy some great clothes) at:

http://www.juma.ca

At the end of last week, our Seedling initiative announced that we'd be focusing on providing support for Joomla through our distributions of it.

What this means is that now anyone can download Seedling's distribution of Joomla for just$49 and optionally choose to add 1 year of email/web ticket support for just $25/month.

Read more about this in the Seedling Blog.

Okay okay, I've totally ignored this blog for ages - sorry y'all, been mad busy @ Design Guru lately with our launch of Seedling, an open source distro/support initiative. Our initial release is a package of joomla and you can read about it @ http://www.plantseedling.com

Anyhoo, until I get a second to drop word on some cool Drupal stuff I've been playing with (expect a few catch-up posts next week), peep these shots from drinks in Toronto tonight; walkah got a few of us together for pints cause Rob from Acquia was in town.