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My favorite podcast website, Lullabot, is hosting a 3-day seminar in New Orleans in December focused on the configuration, architecture, and processes behind building successful Drupal websites and communities. Similar to when I attended the Lullabot workshop in Minneapolis in May, this conference will be graced with not only individuals from big businesses who use Drupal, but inventors and programmers who have contributed to Drupal. I will learn from some of this powerful free software's top developers, hear from community-building experts, examine successful Drupal sites, and meet other web professionals, developers, designers, and decision makers interested in expanding their Drupal knowledge.

I've recently had the pleasure of overhauling an eCommerce website using an open source content management system called the Zen Cart. This handy package is an entire website solution with product management and control any webmaster or store owner could ask for. Upgrades, plug-ins and modules are available for extra and special functionality. There is a team behind the Zen Cart and an open source community growing in size. This ensures you will always be able to find a pro to maintain, upgrade or make major changes to your Zen-Cart website. Even if you don't find someone familiar with the Zen-Cart specifically - but who is a PHP developer, reviewing and creating code in Zen Cart is structured and based on a clever override system. The developer can seperate all of his work from the Zen-Cart core, for easy management and testing and using on other Zen-Cart websites.

May 8th and 9th I will be attending a conference about a specific CMS called Drupal. It is the biggest and baddest CMS and can do the most stuff. Being as large of a package as Drupal is, topics at the conference are the core and how things were put together. Focus will be on module development, and they'll probably cover the popular modules and new ones. Modules are like programs you install on a computer, except you install them on a Drupal website. Upon my return I will be a CMS Gladiator and declare the worlds businesses content databases - my opponent.