Over at Mambo we are currently planning changes to the User Interface. Most GUI (graphical user interface) screens use icons to graphically represent the function or action a user can take. But choosing the right icon, that has the same meaning across languages and cultures can be a real challenge.

Programmers are not know for their interface design expertise and unless a volunteer, open source project has GUI experts donating their time, creating the perfect GUI can be a hit and miss exercise. I took responsibility for preparing a plan. As a result, I am spending a lot of time reading, studying up, and analysing GUI in action in various applications.

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.