I was a huge fan of Amy Stephen's Open Source Community.  The site's mission was built on a desire to be a "place for those of us interested in open source solutions and community issues".  OSC shared a similar goal of mine in which I have a strong desire to bring people together from competing Web CMS projects, products, and organizations and compare perspectives (though I have interest in propriety systems as well as open source).  Unfortunately OSC went offline last April with only a promise to be back up sometime in the future.

I will be taking the site down sometime tomorrow evening and will likely be down for awhile. It could be a week - maybe two, but one day, it'll be back! Thanks!

Recent discussion here at CMSReport.com brought the whereabouts of OSC back into question.  I personally don't know when OSC will ever be back online.  However, I think perhaps the better question might be, if you liked OSC.org what other sites should be considered?  That is a very hard question to answer.

Joomla.org: The August 2008 Joomla! Community Magazine is available now and it's loaded with cool stuff about the World's Greatest Open Source CMS. (Biased? pfff!) Month after month, you will find articles on Joomla! 1.5 Web sites, GPL-compatiable extensions, events, communities around the world, ways to get involved, learning resources for beginners, site integrators, and developers, and the latest buzz on what's happening in the Joomla! project.

Complete Story

"If you jump to the last page of the submitted posts, you'll see that this site [OpenSourceCommunity.org] was officially launched on March 21 in 2007. If I counted well, 260 members have been registered so far, and 1076 blog entries have been posted, what means ca. average 3 posts a day."

Complete Story

Last night, I took the opportunity to spend some time with the Drupal community at a Twin-Cities Drupal Meetup. My trip to Minneapolis for the meetup was on the tail-end of a 1300 mile drive. Those miles covered a drive that looped me south to the state of Missouri and then eventually back north. My activities during the past week ranged from sleeping in the Missouri woods at an old scout cabin with outhouse included...to having conversations in Minnesota with some of Drupal's brightest and most active members. This was a week of contrasts for me and now that I'm back home, I can't help but acknowledge that there was something different about attending a Drupal meetup in comparison to other meetups, workshops, and conferences I've attended in my fields of interest, information technology and atmospheric science.

It didn't dawn on me until during my drive back to South Dakota on what made the evening so unique to me. The people at this Drupal meetup were all happy. I truly can't tell you the last time I've attended something IT related where someone didn't ruin the day or evening for me with their negativity. Seeing the smile on the faces of others is unfortunately something many of us don't get to see often enough. I imagine that not all Drupal events are this pleasant, but it's going to be difficult in the future for me to find an excuse for not spending more time with other Drupal fans.

Table of Contents

• Letter from the Editor
• Feature Article: Drupal as a Catalyst for Community and Change
• Drupal 6
• DrupalCon Boston
• Announcements & Upcoming Events
• Blog Posts of Note
• Case Study
• The Drupal Dojo
• Views 2 Sneak Peek

Drupal Themed is news and content submitted by you the Drupal
community user. It works just like the popular site Digg.com. If you
have a new theme, plugin or just want to show off your Drupal powered
website this is the place to do it. Why Drupal-Themed? Well, there really isn't any place one can submit Drupal news and
get noticed, besides forums etc. so we decided to launch a site that
would be a centralized place to post news regarding Drupal and the
entites surrounding it.

Visit us: http://www.drupal-themed.com

Amy Stephen, site leader for Open Source Community, submitted her 5,000th post in the Joomla! Community Forum. The Joomla! community makes a big deal out of these type of achievements and we've covered some of their milestones in the past. You know what? It's hard not to celebrate someone else's contributions to open source communities. Congratulations to Amy!

Amy Stephen's 5,000th post in the Joomla! Community Forum

Amy Stephen submitted her 5,000th post in the Joomla! Community Forum. She is a very helpful and open-minded lady, we should call her the Honorary Joomla! Core Team Member: she was an attendee of the OSCMS Summit hosted by Yahoo! last year and she gave there lectures about Joomla!. She encourages the forum members getting involved in the project and now she is one of the enthusiastic supporters of the GHOP Contest - she submitted the fifth of her posts in this forum.

I really like the advice Global Moxie has given their users for how best to promote their content management system, Big Medium. In their blog post, Psst... Pass It On! Spreading the Word about Big Medium, they talk about various way users can "spread the word" about Big Medium. They show a good understanding for how online communities work, including what you shouldn't do when marketing a product via a blog or forum.

Don’t be a zealot

If you’re posting in forums or on blogs, be considerate of the community around you. Offer comments that are appropriate to the context and that will genuinely help people understand if Big Medium is right for them. No software is perfect for every project, so feel free to share Big Medium’s pros and cons. Be yourself, be honest.

One of the frustrations I have with forums sponsored by the various CMS owners and open source projects is when no other CMS but their own is seen as a solution. Potential users of CMS have a difficult time knowing what to believe is the right application for them when no one admits that their product isn't right for them.