The SXSW Showdown

by George DeMet

The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind for us here at Palantir, full of site launches, module releases, and more! We barely got our feet back on the ground here in Chicago after DrupalCon DC before it was time to head off to the next event, South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) in Austin, TX.

Tiffany Farriss, Colleen Carroll, and I had a great time, got to attend some really good sessions, and hang out with friends, including some folks from Lullabot who helped throw the awesome 32 Bit party. Colleen and I were even interviewed by Zadi Diaz for PBS about open source Web development and Drupal.

Of course, the biggest event for us was the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny panel, which featured Colleen, Steve Fisher of Idea Market, and Matt Mullenweg of Automattic talking about how they led three teams of all-star developers from the Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress communities to build out the same Web site in each of their chosen platforms to benefit community leadership programs. I served as the moderator.

The overflow audience was full of energy and there was lots of great back-and-forth between the panelists. While we didn't have time to do a walkthrough of the sites, I think we did a good job of talking about the different development processes each team used, the challenges each one faced, and the fact that all three were able to contribute back to their respective projects, a clear victory for open source software development.

When we got to the end and asked the audience which team they thought was the winner, they refused to make a decision, saying they wanted to learn more about the three sites before rendering a verdict. So we declared all three platforms winners, promising to release all of the material gathered for the session (including source code, documentation, training videos, etc.) on a site we've set up at cmsshowdown.com.

There's not much up there right now, but we'll be gradually releasing it all over the next few weeks. In the meantime, I do want to caution folks about making too many judgments about the project based solely on looking at the sites that are publicly viewable; many of the features and functionality are currently hidden for anonymous users, though we're working on way to show them to the public. Suffice it to say that all three teams delivered fantastic sites, and it was clear that none of them were held back in any way by the platforms that they were using.

We've also been linking to some of the movies, screencasts, and other things that people have recorded, including this interview Colleen did for Lullabot at DrupalCon as part of their new "Drupal Voices" series. The folks at SXSW should also be releasing the audio of the session, which I am planning to edit together with the material from my slides.

I'll also be presenting a more in-depth look at the project at CMS Expo here in Chicago at the end of April; we have a little more time to work with, so I am planning to do walkthroughs of the sites for this event. We're also working on bringing in some special guests for this session that will be able to provide additional insights into the project and how it benefits local communities.

George DeMet

George is the founder and co-owner of Palantir. He has a BA from Northwestern University and specializes in strategic leadership in user interface, usability and standards compliant development. He has over 17 years of experience in Internet design and development, and is a member of the Drupal Association's advisory board. George provides consultation, project planning, training, and user-side development leadership.

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Comments

HI

Is there a contrib/custom/module list up anywhere? BTW It all looks so clean, nice job!

Thanks

Anonymous —

George, you came up with the contest idea, organized it, and developed the specs and evaluation with your staff, one of your clients, and a guy being paid to working on Drupal 7. Your own employees formed most of the Drupal team.

It's beyond belief that the real reason why a winner was not picked is that you didn't realize people in attendance wanted to see demos so they could make an informed vote.

SXSW is about interactive, multimedia, technology. Do you really expect people to believe you didn't know everyone expected to be able to evaluate demos of the team entries for themselves, which were available well beforehand? So much for showing up for a showdown.

Why also has there not been an official release of all three team's themes, as promised? The only reason I can think of to explain this is the people involved in the contest have decided that open competition is unhealthy (mainly for their business interests) and have taken it upon themselves to suppress their work so no one can ever set up a public demo of the showdown that never happened.

Dan Knauss —

Hi Dan -

I'm more than happy to "come clean" about the CMS Showdown, and the reasons that some material from the competition hasn't yet been released on the cmsshowdown.com Web site.

Before I get into the gritty details however, I want to be clear that all three sites have been available for public viewing at drupalshowdown.com, joomlashowdown.com, and wpshowdown.com since March 3, which was the deadline for all three teams to complete their entries. The CMS Showdown site also includes all of the material each team submitted along with their sites, including documentation, screencasts, and the results of a survey completed by each team leader. I believe that all of this material provides a great resource for anyone trying to decide which CMS is best for their project.

The only material from the competition that has not yet been released are the source code archives for each site and some of the video material gathered during the user evaluation portion.

In the case of the source code, which is what I think you're most concerned about, I do apologize for the delay, as I had fully intended to have this up on the site much earlier; however, there were some initial delays in getting properly-formatted archive files from all three teams, and I haven't yet had an opportunity to check all three sites to make sure that all passwords and sensitive database information has been removed. This has long been on my "to-do" list, however, and I will be more than happy to drop you an e-mail the instant that it happens, which will probably be in the next couple of weeks.

We ended up gathering a large amount of video, not all of which was relevant to the competition. Again, editing this video into a format that's easy for people to view and provides valuable information for folks trying to decide which CMS to use is something I've not yet had time to do.

The reason that demos were not shown of the admin areas for all three sites at the SXSW presentation was not that I "didn't realize" the audience would want to see demos, but that we simply didn't have enough time to do so within an hour-long session, even considering that we started a few minutes early. The focus of the SXSW session was on the development process taken by each team, and the challenges each faced building a site within the imposed restrictions.

Full site demos were, however, shown in the CMS Showdown reprise session that was presented at CMS Expo in Chicago at the end of April. This session was an hour and a half long and focused at a beginning-level audience, which gave us the opportunity to demonstrate more of how each site worked, both on the frontend and the backend. This session received coverage in several places, including an article in CMS Wire.

As far as charges that the competition was somehow biased because two of the Drupal team members work for my company, or because the person who designed the competition site has also done work for the Drupal community, all I can say is that I've endeavored to be completely transparent from day one, and everyone who participated in the Showdown was fully aware of who else was involved before the competition began. The specs were designed to challenge all three teams, and in my opinion, the fact that all of them delivered sites with comparable levels of functionality in less than 100 hours demonstrates the strengths of all three platforms. While I, too, fully expected there to be a single "winner" out of the Showdown, in the end, it became clear that while each site included some features and not others, the differences between them weren't significant enough for the evaluators or the audiences to be able to declare a single winner.

The fact that all three teams ended up contributing code back to their respective projects as a result of this competition is a further win for the open source software development model.

George DeMet —

George -

It's unfortunate you are being "called into account." You might remember Dan's blog post prior to the event about the unfair advantage for the Drupal team due to your involvement with the Drupal project and the selection of one of the judges. I responded to his concerns, at that time, stating that we, on the Joomla! team, were confident of the process.

Last night, Dan shot a series of Twitter questions my way and I shared with him the Joomlacode repository for Tamka within *seconds*. The Tamka repository on Joomlacode contains all of the code I wrote for the Tamka project that was used in the SxSW entry. That has been open since before the event, during the event, and has remained open since the event. The code is licensed using the GPL and has been used by a number of developers.

I explained this to Dan in Twitter. I am not ready to promote Tamka's wide use for two reasons:

1. It's not ready for non-techie use. I am rebuilding Tamka using a much more robust content framework. I am also busy trying to earn a living and working on commercial projects that consume my time. My hope is that I can leverage ideas and code from my commercial work into Tamka.

2. I am not ready to address support. I will release Tamka when I am certain it is safe and stable and worthy and when I can support it's use. Meanwhile, those who can take care of themselves can take of it.

If you remember, there was an explosion of blog like solutions that came shortly after the Joomla! SxSW entry. This work has had a positive impact on application design and thinking outside of what some felt was limitations in Joomla!. Some of the code will be included in Joomla! 1.6, BTW, so, that's pretty cool.

Dan - remember when you posted in the Joomla! forums, suggesting somehow Tamka, work that the JXtended folks have done, Wilco's Mollom span protection, and even Dries and therefore, the entire Drupal project, were somehow pieces of some subversive plan that you were trying to put together? Remember how you called us to account to explain away your concerns? Remember how you shared the link with CMS Wire to give them a heads up in the media?

Of course, we all wasted time defending ourselves since such innuendos are damaging.

Why not take time to ask people about your concerns before you initiate accusatory blog posts, paranoid, probing forum topics, and offensive blog posts? Most questions are easily answered. Most of us who contribute in free software are pretty genuine folks. In the last four years, I've given thousands of hours freely to Joomla!, Dan. This is silly.

My apologies, George, for letting you down. I would have liked to have had time to bundle this up in a way that you could distribute. Some day, it will be there. In hindsight, adding distribution to such an ambitious challenge might have been a bit much for a quick competition. Regardless, it wasn't you who failed, it was me. I do share the code. People have and use it. I'm just not ready to distribute a package.

I know it takes considerable time to arrange these types of contests and I appreciative the effort Palantir made in this professional SxSW entry. Much good came from this and I am honored to have participated. George - thanks for making this happen.

Amy

Amy Stephen —