The calendar is moving fast toward one of my favorite content management focused conferences, the CMS Expo which is hosted every year in Evanston, Illinois (near Chicago). This year, the conference will be held on the 14th, 15th, and 16th of May once again at the Hilton Orrington Hotel. This event is billed as a "Learning & Business" conference showcasing some of the world's leading content management systems and the people who power them. Whether the CMS you favor is proprietary or open source, focused on small business or enterprise, non-profit, government or commercial applications, there is something for everyone at CMS Expo.

The recording video of the March 26th CMS-Connected show is now available online. CMS-Connected is a monthly webcast featuring news, trends and commentary related to the content management industry. In this particular show the focus was on mobile and social eCommerce with much of that discussion including Gabe Sumner from Sitefinity. I also participated as a guest on the show discussing my impressions of MODX  during the "In the Spotlight" segment.

The first thing I did when I sat down to write this article was search the Google Keyword Tools for ‘Proprietary vs. Open Source CMS’. I wanted to see what kind of traffic this article might get. I got 0 searches per month globally.  A flip of the terms to the title I chose nets a whopping 22.  With < 10 in the United States.

My curiosity was piqued, so I checked ‘Open Source CMS’ and ‘Proprietary CMS’ and was not surprised with the 9,900 global searches for the former to 91 for the latter. This is out of 450,000 searches globally for ‘CMS’.

What I am surprised about is that more people aren’t looking for information comparing these two very different approaches to CMS.

"We can now send people through their own personal industrial revolution in 90 days. So if you're a bright guy, a bright gal, you got an idea you can turn it into reality. Just like you could do it in code 15 years ago, now you can do it in hardware."

- Mark Hatch, CEO Techshop, Interview by Robert Scoble in "America's most important startup?",  Video published on Mar 25, 2013 via YouTube

Yesterday, Dries Buytaert announced on his blog that Acquia has released the next generation of Mollom, the Mollom Content Moderation Platform. The new Mollom platform is being billed by Acquia as the "first cloud content moderation platform built for the enterprise". Mollom is capable of reducing the time that’s required to moderate large volumes of user-generated content. Personally having used Mollom to assist me in moderating user content for small to medium sites, I would think the need for something like Mollom is even greater for enterprises with an even larger web presence.

DotNetNuke (DNN) has announced a social software solution aimed at optimizing customer engagement and loyalty through online communities. DNN Social gives businesses the ability to easily create and manage communities on their existing websites, giving end-users a one-stop destination for consuming content, exchanging ideas and interacting with other community members.

All this talk about CXM being DOA has got me thinking about the age old question when it comes to CMS – or software in general for that matter.  Should you try to build the world into your software, or focus on specific capabilities and integrate for the rest?

Mobile compatible, mobile optimized, responsive web design and adaptive web design are all terms that have been used interchangeably, and often incorrectly, to describe websites displayed, and used, on mobile devices.

If you're a business or organization interested in making your website look and behave just as spiffy on a mini-tablet as on your widescreen monitor, there are a few routes you could take to this destination.

The two we discuss here are: (1) adaptive web design and (2) responsive web design.