In an Iron Chef-like match up, a team of developers from each CMS had 100 hours to build a website based on a specific list of specifications and design. Then representatives of each team would appear face to face to show off their hard work during the South by Southwest Interactive festival. I had the chance to attend the face off and found it to be very fun to watch.

It was a battle to the end. With a mix of good humor and serious competition, leaders from Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress met face to face during a Monday session called “The Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny” at South by Southwest. The panelists included Steve Fisher (Joomla!), Colleen Carroll (Drupal), and Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) and led by George DeMet of Palantir.net. The room was packed full of CMS fans, with a heavy emphasis on WordPress. You could hear a small group of men chanting for their favorite CMS before the event got underway. The mood was festive but there was an air of competition brewing as each person threw CMS taunts at each other.

DeMet came up with the idea and explained how each team of developers were given the task to build a website for a community leadership program in Elgin, Illinois. The developers were asked to use a number of web-based social networking and collaboration tools. The end goal is to build websites that are general enough to be able to be downloaded by organizations and communities to meet their needs. All of the specifications are listed on Palantir.net’s blog or available in a PDF format. The teams were also expected to stay true to a site design created by Mark Boulton who is well-known for his web design and book, “Five Simple Steps: A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web“. Developers could only use freely-available software to build the sites and function on a shared hosting space (Linux/Apache/MySQL).

A lot of time was spent talking about how the teams worked together on the site creation and the effort it took to build the sites. The Joomla! team never met face-to-face. Developers spanned across the globe and spent most time talking over Skype or conference calls. The Drupal team started with a face-to-face sprint to get the site started and then they worked together to finish the rest of the work. You can follow how Mullenweg’s WordPress team completed their tasks by visiting  a site they built to keep up with the project. Here is a comparison of how the sites came together under deadline:

DeMet mentioned how most validation errors were minor. But Carroll said the Drupal Community learned a lot from the discovery of those errors and they were able to put in a number of new patches to help improve the overall CMS. Mullenweg and Fischer said this project helped in similar ways. Mullenweg talked about how his team had a great time outside of the development by adding Zoolander-related content. The added fun was not a requirement. The Drupal and Joomla! teams added filler to populate their sites.

The crowd seemed pretty disappointed when it became clear there would be no live demonstrations of the websites. All of the sites can be viewed from the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny website. They did get to hear reactions from Boulton and Senior Program Officer Marybeth Schroeder from the Evanston Community Foundation. DeMet had worked with the organization before and used its needs to launch the competition in the first place. The crowd enjoyed watching her reaction as she looked through each versions of the website. Schroeder had no CMS preference before looking at the sites, a perspective that was not easy to find in the SXSW session. There was an attempt to record how she used each site. In one screen capture video, you could see her trying to figure out the WordPress dashboard. In the case of the Joomla! site, Schroeder had a hard time adding a location for an event.

From the designer perspective, Boulton said he favored the WordPress and Drupal sites for how they stayed true to his design. He gave Joomla! a hit for not following all of his typography. Fisher countered that they made that decision because the Joomla! team didn’t like it. Boulton did not say anything specifically about the usefulness or user experience of the sites.

In what was expected to be a dramatic end to the competition, DeMet asked the crowd to vote on who should win. Many people yelled out how they felt they did not have enough knowledge of the sites to pick. Others yelled out the CMS they already supported. That indecisiveness let to a draw. DeMet announced all three CMS won and tried to figure out a way to share the belt-buckle award.

There may be no defined answer on what is the best open source CMS. It was clear this project helped motivate the open source communities to team together and come up with products that can help non-profits launch a website that meets their needs. Each development team will make their work available for anyone to use. The Joomla! and WordPress teams even created help videos on the showdown website. The event at SXSW was also a great way to talk about CMS and get open source products more play among a large and growing population of tech-minded people who are looking for a new way to share information online.

DeMet plans to talk about the showdown again in April at a pre-conference event for the CMS Expo in Evanston, Illinois.

A couple of fun things came out during this session. First, the WordPress song is TOO funny. Also, you can enjoy this Drupal song. There was a Joomla! song but I can’t find it online, plus it’s instrumental and a bit boring compared to the other two!

(You can see a similar version of this post at CMSwire.com)

It’s so interesting to be around so many people who understand technology… A conversation I’ve heard a lot is how these web and interactive-based ideas we are talking about are often not supported by higher management. It’s the case in industries across the board. It’s not just a problem for journalism. But watching another newspaper fall today (the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) is more reason for me to feel the need to dump my ideas on how to change the way we teach journalism students of today. The P-I is doing things a little differently than the Rocky Mountain News closure. In Seattle’s case the “paper” will live on in a web-format only. That means many traditional journalists will have to turn their thought process completely around and put web as the priority. Sure, many newsrooms are starting to put that priority out there. This is the first time in a long time where the change in priority is about to be come the only priority. Journalists need to think web first.

So how do these long-standing journalism schools do it?

I have an idea that I’ve been working with for a while and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

For years journalism students have been taught how to get dropped into a story (it can be breaking news, developing news or just feature stories) and be able to become “instant experts.” A general assignment reporter for a broadcast station is sent from story to story with no over arching purpose beyond covering the community or city. A general assignment reporter for most newsrooms follows a large beat on a city or education or entertainment (you get the drift)… But no one is specifically focused on one topic and tasked with building a community and understanding the existing community surrounding that topic.

Jane Stevens is working on fixing that challenge as part of the Reynolds Journalism Institute. She’s working on creating a web structure that will help journalists do good journalism even if they don’t have a traditional newsroom to back them up. It would basically be an out-of-the-box tool for community building and focused research and journalistic work. She’s leading a project to create what she calls a “health shell.” It’s a web structure were individual journalists can collect data about various aspects of the health issue and collaborate online with a website where you can share a community of people who care about that topic. It’s exciting to watch some of my students get to really know an element of health that they find important. Some current topics are fitness, senior health literacy and mental health. The student journalists are learning what it takes to gather sources and get a solid understanding of a niche. But here’s the trick: when the student wrap up this semester, some are going to graduate, others are going to run off for the summer. How can we keep this project sustainable within this higher education environment?

That got me thinking about journalism school curriculum.

Here’s my idea. I kind of base it off of how we make the radio-television sequence work. In the first semester you learn the foundation of skills. In the second semester you refine those skills and get good enough to work in the newsroom. In the third semester you are a regular reporter each week. For a community-based website, you could do something similar. In the first semester you learn the foundation of skills it takes to be a multi-media journalist and how to gather data and collect information. In the second semester you are an assistant to the lead community journalists for a specific niche website. In the third semester you are a leader of the community. It requires something different. Instead of becoming a general assignment reporter, you learn how to be a niche reporter. You learn what it takes to grow a connection with your community and get to know it well enough to be a legitimate presence online. The challenge: students would have to pick a niche during the first semester and stick with it. If they hate the niche by the end of a year and a half, then at least they know what it takes to gather up enough sources to really get a niche website rolling. Then they know what it takes to find another niche and get a job doing it elsewhere. That research and community building can be taken into so many directions after graduation. I think it would be amazing. Plus, the niche websites at the Missouri School of Journalism would continue to rock.

Ahhh. It feels better to let that out.

I have attended all kinds of sessions and I’ll try to write about some here and there as I go but I really felt like I needed to get this one out there as soon as possible!

There are currently a number of tools that help journalists do things differently. But we are so early into this process that none of us can fully wrap our minds around what it looks like. What most of the journalists I’ve talked to are saying is we need to make some pretty radical changes. I’ve also had time to work out how I envision a change in journalism curriculum. It’s taken the last week of conversation – but I hope to spend some time today writing it out for all to see!

But first – I’m going to head to the SXSW convention center to learn and talk!

I’m headed to Austin, Texas to take part in the monster South by Southwest Interactive festival (SxSWi). It’s days and days and days of networking, conference sessions, product testing and social gatherings. Heck, I’ve even found a group of people that runs each morning. I hope to take this time to meet hundreds of people who are involved in thinking big and thinking social online. I hope to meet dozens of people I’ve met on Twitter. I hope to learn about ideas and ways journalists can better tell stories. I hope to learn about new tools that will help journalists be journalists even if they don’t have a newsroom. It will be a heck of an experience and it can be pretty overwhelming to even figure out a schedule.

I hope to twitter the experience throughout the week… And attempt to summarize one or two “aha” moments each day. If I have enough time, I’ll also try to share bits of video and photos. If there is anything you’re interested in learning about the event – please let me know. I’ll ask questions and meet people for you if you can’t attend the festival in person!