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Earlier this year we announced that we were open sourcing our CMS. Yes, we announced it in March. Yes, it is now almost July. Here’s an update on what’s happened since then and what we’re planning to do.

First, I want to clarify that we still plan on open sourcing our CMS. Our delay in getting it out there has nothing to do with us changing our minds.

When we were deciding whether to take the leap and open source our CMS, the question we kept asking ourselves was: If there was a CMS that was already out there that did what we wanted it to do, would we use it? We originally built our CMS because we couldn’t find an existing one that did what we wanted it to do – at least not an affordable one. But we’ve always been on the lookout for something that we could leverage instead of it all being custom.

Since we made that initial post announcing the open sourcing of our CMS we found a new platform which has a lot of the blogging functionality that our CMS didn’t have yet, is very flexible in terms of the design, is easy to customize and extend, and is fast. The flexibility in terms of the code has allowed us to integrate the important pieces of our current CMS into it.

We’re currently transitioning our existing functionality to this platform and will then open source core components of our CMS that integrate with the new platform. This will actually be easier for a CU to deploy and will provide more functionality.

We’re shooting for a late-summer deployment of our first site on this platform and will release the core components shortly after. If we haven’t given you real code by the Partnership Symposium in October then I give you permission to kick me in the ankle.

The Symposium is coming together nicely – Colin, Denise, Guy, Jason, Lisa, Lydia, Rob, Ron, and Shari have all confirmed their speaking times – with Denise and Ron taking the stage one after the other. If you’ve followed exchanges on their blogs, you know it’ll be two can’t-miss sessions.

Tim McAlpine has been awarded the at-large speaker slot thanks to an outpouring of support from his fans. He sends the following message to Timvotees:

Speaking of registration, on the newly-minted FORUM Solutions website – disclosure: it’s a Trabian-built site, and we’re darn proud of it :) – you can register and pay online. Also, you can find the speaker schedule and transportation directions here.

By the way, I’m geared up for BarCampBankSeattle and collaborating there with some of my favorite FI bloggers. If you can make it, it promises to be, as Gene calls it, “intense, sort of like the Olympics of Seminars.”