Authored by Meike Jung and Stephan Luckow.
How can Drupal compete with the large budgets of proprietary software sales teams? It’s not just a question for Drupal. Other open source projects that largely depend on the work of volunteers have similar challenges. That’s why we decided it was worth a try to cooperate with other communities struggling with similar issues.
The project CMS Garden is an amalgamation of Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, TYPO3, Plone, django CMS and 6 other open source content management systems to join forces for common marketing and public relations activities.
Founded 2012 in Germany, this non-commercial initiative presents the cooperating open source CMS projects to a broad public audience, primarily by trade fair and conference presences as well as by maintaining an internet platform. The target group is quite broad: new blood, users, future contributors, and of course, buying departments and the like.
CMS Garden's first project was a 90 square meter booth at CeBIT 2013, the world's largest IT trade fair. In addition to CeBIT, another three presences at trade fairs/conferences were organized in 2013, as well as presentations at smaller events. To bolster the initiative, participants created a book called the CMS Gardener's Guide, which has been handed out on all those occasions and was received with great interest.
This bilingual book is absolutely unique: It is a collection of the most relevant open source CMS' portraits, facilitating the direct comparison. All contributions have been written by insiders and have been editorially reviewed, with an emphasis on (self) critical considerations. New chapters will be added to the new 2014 edition which shall support decision-making.
CMS Garden has proven to be a winning concept. Despite some initial concerns about cooperating with potential competitors, CMS Garden has turned out to be one large community, helping each other with solutions and having a good time together. At no time has anyone involved expressed concern that they lost a potential client to another system. That’s because everyone involved is committed to focusing on customer needs.
You can support this unique project: Supporting options range from donations via advertisement booking to personal participation. More information on the CMS Garden website.
The authors:
Meike Jung, marketing manager of the German Drupal Association, is a Drupal sitebuilder and themer and conceptual designer since 2008. With her communications bureau hexabinaer as well as member of the Drupal cooperative Reinblau she provides a lot of contributions for the marketing and translation of Drupal.
Stephan Luckow is the vice president of the German Drupal Association. His Gesellschaft zur Entwicklung von Dingen ("Company for the Development of Things";) in Berlin, Germany incubates IT-driven projects, of which one is Reinblau, a Drupal cooperative. For a more effective promotion of Drupal, he co-founded the collaborative project CMS Garden.
