All over the Net, on every open source CMS forum, you will find people asking whether or not they should use that CMS. The answer is not an easy one, but can be given in a two-word sentence, “that depends”.

If you are new to content management systems you may find it difficult to understand just what a CMS actually is. The problem is, the term has become used in so many different ways that almost anything can be called a CMS these days. If you search on Google for “what is a CMS” you get thousands of results returned. A quick scan of those results shows that the term CMS is used to describe many different things. We have Asset Management Systems, document management, records management, and the enterprise grades of CMS, as well as the subset of all this which is really where most Open Source CMS’’s fall - Web Content Management.

Those of you who visit here regularly will have noticed there have been a few changes. The site name has changed - no longer, “Lynne Pope, City Councillor”, the site is now “discourse and data”. The words are self-explanatory. I did not seek a third term as a city councillor so on 13th October, my time as an elected public figure came to an end. I continue to serve my community, but no longer within the council chambers. For a long time I have kept my public life and outside interests separate and used this site to keep in contact with the people I represented. Now that I am just me, citizen again, I am going to use this blog to talk about the other things I work with.