Last week I participated in a panel discussion hosted by the Web Content Mavens. I really had the easy seat of the group. I had the opportunity to speak first and therefore inadvertently steal other people's points and cause them to respond to me. While it wasn't the goal, it was an unexpected and interesting situation...

After taking a few days to digest the discussion, I wanted to share some closing thoughts and open questions:

First of all, there are still *huge* misunderstandings about licensing. It was even brought up in the opening statements. GPL vs BSD... who cares? Each determines the rules, requirements, and expectations if you choose to distribute your customizations. Read that statement carefully. Neither of these licenses require you to distribute anything. It is entirely up to you.

Wow... this one has been a long time in coming...

Late last summer when David All and I pitched the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation on a site redesign, it went swimmingly. We were going to work to bring them up to date, give them a better architecture all the way around, and give us all something to be proud of. Fast forward a few months and the design had a major overhaul. Add in some unexpectedly complexities in import... and you get the idea.

Well in the last couple weeks, the whole site has been revamped. It started with a few little things like font colors and tightening up some borders, but quickly extended to balancing the layouts of some boxes, replacing the tiled background image (ack!) with a smooth gradient, and a header nav bar. It was a number of little things... but they added up quickly.

So of course, I'm going to share it here:

This is what I get for not tracking my schedule more closely...

On the 27th of February - yes, less than two weeks from now - I will be participating in a panel discussion from the Web Content Mavens group in downtown DC.

Here are the details:

For those of you who have been lurking around here for the past couple years, you've noticed very few changes to the overall look and feel of the site. Despite all the work we've done for various customers in integrating their systems and normalizing their sites, tools, and operations, we've been remiss in providing the same services for ourselves.

Starting this weekend, CaseySoftware will be going through some radical changes:
* the support forums (phpBB) will be imported to Drupal forums - most of you weren't aware of them anyway;
* the main site (exponentCMS) will be imported into Drupal;
* the shopping cart (ZenCart) will be dropped in favor of Drupal's eCommerce module;
* the blogs.caseysoftware subdomain will become part of the main site.