CMS-Garden CeBIT 2014
And again a different kind of garden blossomed in spring of 2014 at CeBIT: The CMS Garden, the association of leading open source content management systems, exhibited again in Hall 6, right next to Open Source Park. There seemed to be even more interest than last year. In the end, thousands of conversations during these five days left the stand crews and representatives exhausted ...
For the second time the members of what is now an official NGO took on the challenge of participating in the world's largest IT fair. On hand was the newly-printed edition of the CMS Garden booklet, the current CMS comparison tests in hard copy.
Dressed in gardeners' aprons and hats, the representatives of the different systems faced visitors' questions. The spirit of community was just as impressive as always. In typical open source community style, this was not about competition, "market share" or the best system, but about the perfect CMS in terms of customer requirements and wishes.
The "Open Source Sustainability Award" was awarded for the first time. This prize for sustainability in cooperation with open source initiatives was won by Germany's Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (Society for International Cooperation - GIZ).
In total there were no less than 65 voluntary CMS ambassadors from Contao, Contenido, Drupal, Joomla, ScientifcCMS, Typo3, Plone and Wordpress on site during the five days of the show. This represents a major effort and contribution by the members of CMS Garden eV who exclusively work on a volunteer basis.
CMS-Garden CeBIT 2013
The world-wide leading Open Source Content Management Systems jointly presented themselves on the CeBIT for the first time. The “CMS-Garden” in hall 6 was the focus of the Enterprise Content Management in 2013.
Content Management Systems in the business world are dominated by Open Source products. There is not any commercial software company that can keep up with the commitment and the creativity of the many voluntary and international programmers who offer their downloads for free. Their programs are absolutely professional and of very high quality.
Open Source communities have created own commercial ecosystems around their achievements. A whole lot of agencies, web designers, graphic designers and programmers all over the world earn their living with the implementation and the design of these contents.
As part of the philosophy these agencies and designers were called upon to support this unique union of communities in order to give something back to the community for its efforts.
At CeBIT 2013 more than a dozen of systems like TYPO 3, Drupal, Joomla, OpenCMS, Contao, Plone, ModX, WordPress, Papaya, ScientificCMS and many more were present.
The different approaches to store texts, pictures and multimedia elements as well as to present them preferably efficient and attractive on the internet was in the foreground of the presentation on the exhibition. Different systems have different focus areas for their use. Over the last years this view has led to a varied mixture of systems that invited the customers to compare during the exhibition in Hannover.
The aim was a peaceful competition of smart people to get the best solution. This was a win-win all around: The visitors and customer who could follow the different strategies up to the finished presentation; the agencies that could find the best tools for the design of professional websites at one place and last but not least the programmers who could take a curious look at the skills of their colleagues from the other companies.
The whole thing was financed by an information book especially published for this event. This book is not only a documentation of systems but also a schedule of services of the agencies and freelancers. A range of companies and agencies supported this ambitious purpose by any article and advertisement. The information book consists of an editorial section in which each participating Open-Source-CMS is introduced on 3 pages in German and English as well as of a list with all the service providers concerning all CM-systems.
You will find any information of the CMS-Garden on www.cms-garden.org.
