Earlier today, Klaas asked me some feedback about last week's Open Source CMS seminar at IT Works. This reminded me that I did not yet blog about this event.

Approximately 24 people showed up for an afternoon of case-studies of projects using an open source content management system. Out of these 24, at least 10 were presenters which leaves only very few 'real' attendants. Personally, I think this low turnout was a little bit disappointing.

During the first session the Vlerick Management School presented the rollout of their new website based on Daisy. Apparently they were quite happy with the whole project. This does not surprise me because the nice guys of Outerthought, the creators of Daisy, know their stuff.

The second session was presented by Smals and explained the web publishing platform they have built on top of Hippo CMS. They used it for the 'Aan de slag' website which collects and explains all kinds of government employment programs. This project was started in 2005 and it was by far the oldest of the projects presented during the seminar. They were currently in doubt whether the major rewrite that Hippo is undergoing - they're moving away from Apache Cocoon as back-end - is really worth it. In the end it might be easier to migrate to another CMS than to upgrade to the new version of Hippo when it becomes available.

Session number three was about the use of Drupal as the platform of choice for the redesign of the RTBF website, currently being developed by ONE Agency. RTBF is the government organization responsible for the French speaking radio and television, so a lot of the presentation focused on the handling of multimedia content. It was an interesting talk which provided some background information about how a new module like imagecrop comes into existence. The only negative point about this session was that it was all about a site that is not live yet.

The fourth and final session was by Amplexor about their implementation of Alfresco for the Dutch city of Maastricht. It was a little bit awkward because the solution was not web based which made it really hard to compare it against the other presentations.

During both the introduction and the conclusion several obvious (but often forgotten) aspects of content management were mentioned. They can all be summed up as: "A fool with a tool is still a fool".

Overall it was an interesting afternoon which gave a nice overview of some implementations of different open source CMS solutions.