Your Questions Wanted: Open Source CMS Panel Discussion

Ultra Light Startups, a New York-based tech entrepreneur's group, is
hosting a panel discussion on Open Source content management systems on Thursday, December 4.

I'll be speaking about Drupal along with experts from Joomla (Donna
Vincent) and WordPress (Steve Bruner). People often ask for comparisons between these projects but it's uncommon to find people who have a depth of familiarity in all three systems together in one place, so this promises to be a unique discussion. The panel will be videotaped and made available online.

In order to facilitate a valuable discussion, I've started a list of suggested discussion questions. I'd like to ask you, fellow Drupalers (and any non-Drupalers), to suggest questions that you think will help highlight the differences between these systems and add value to the discussion. Below is my list of suggested questions, starting with ones that seek introductory information to the platforms:

• What kinds of websites/web applications have been built on your platform?
• How large is your development community? Approximatley how many installations are there? How many modules/plugins and themes are available?
• What license covers the code in your project?
• What is your project's greatest asset?
• Is your platform aimed towards developers, casual site builders, or both?
• Making your site's content externally available via an API adds value to your product/service and is important to staying competitive. How does your platform facilitate - exposing this data?
• What major companies have invested directly in the development of your platform?
• Are there many service providers for your platform?
• What has your platform done to improve scalability/performance since its last release? In general?
• What are the key features that your project provides to improve the efficiency of developing advanced websites/web applications?
• How does your project stay up to date on security of the platform?
• In an open source project, it's important to carefully vet code changes. How does your project make sure that code is well maintained?
• What organizational steps has your project taken to ensure that it is around two years from now?

Participants at Ultra Light Startups events are tech entrepreneurs (including service providers)
and investors, and Drupal community members are invited to attend. Space is limited, so for more information and tickets, visit the event page. I'll also be handing out a limited number of vouchers for a free copy of the upcoming Drupal in Action.