Last week (5-9 March 2013) Joomla was present at CeBIT 2013, the world's largest and most international computer expo in Hannover, Germany. We shared a booth called “CMS Garden” with 12 other open source content management systems (CMS). The idea behind this shared booth was to have all of the relevant open source content management systems all in one place. 

Two of those systems are, just like Joomla, in the top 3 of leading CMS systems: Wordpress and Drupal.

So who won?

Actually, CMS Garden wasn’t a competition between the different CMS systems. There was a very friendly atmosphere between all the volunteers from the different systems. Those volunteers talked with the visitors about open source software & the different systems. And when the visitors had specific questions about a specific CMS, we all directed them to the volunteers of that system.

I noticed that a lot of people left the CMS Garden with a happy smile. Probably because at CMS Garden they learned new solutions for their problems, all free of charge. Other booths mainly have marketing & sales people trying to sell their solution with a lof of marketing blah blah. Besides, they might have been surprised about "competing" CMS systems working together like this. It might have almost been a bit like finding out that the musicians of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were actually friends with each other in real life :-)

The winner

If I would really have to point a winner: most likely the more than 10,000 visitors that we had at the booth, who came in contact with various open source CMS & their communities.

Furthermore, I have had interesting conversations with volunteers from the other CMS systems about the differences & similarities between software, the distribution, extensions, the organizations and the communities. I think that we all learned from the other open source systems.

I would like to thank David Jardin for the excellent organization! And the following people for helping out at the Joomla booth: David Jardin, Gerald Martin, Peter Martin, Robert Mittl, Niels Nübel, Radek Suski, Sigrid Suski, Stefan Wendhausen, Jonathan Werner, and Markus Wortmann.

Finally the other volunteers from our colleague CMSes: Contao, Contenido, django CMS, Drupal, ModX, OpenCMS, Papaya, Plone, RedAxo CMS, Scientific CMS, Typo3, and Wordpress.