Join us for the Ultimate Showdown!

The first round of panel selections for next spring’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival have just been posted, and I’m pleased to be able to announce that for the second year in a row, I’ll be one of the presenters!

The session that was selected is titled “Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny”, and it’s inspired by an idea that we came up with while planning this past spring's Content Management System Roundup session. While that panel provided a basic introduction to several widely-used CMS platforms, including SharePoint, Drupal, Expression Engine, and Serena Collage, this year’s session will be an Iron Chef-style competition where three teams of Web developers will build out an identical site for a not-for-profit organization in three different CMS platforms. The overall winner will be decided by the organization based on which site meets their needs best, and will hopefully provide a more in-depth look at the strengths and weaknesses of developing sites for each platform.

While we haven’t decided yet exactly which CMS platforms will be included in the competition, you should definitely expect to see Drupal represented, as well as other products like Joomla!, Expression Engine, and WordPress. The final selection will be made at the same time that we pick the benefiting organization, and will be based on their needs and capabilities.

Even though SXSW isn’t until next March, we have some pretty big plans for this session, and we’ll be posting more details here as they become available, so stay tuned!