This month I had the privilege of attending the CMS Expo in Evanston, IL, just outside of Chicago. This was my first time to Chicago and I know now why they call it "The Windy City." No, the people there are not full of hot air, it really was very windy.

CMS Expo brought together four main open source communities as well as the business community together for a learning, evaluating and connecting conference. There was a wide variety of attendees at the conference. We received stickers to identify the roles that we were there representing. The four main roles were: developer, designer, business and administration. Some attendees were researching a CMS for their site, while others were looking to improve their skills with a particular CMS.

While I was there to learn more about the Drupal CMS, I will cover some of the major points that I took away from the conference on Drupal. They are:

• Get involved in the community. Several key elements were discussed to get started. They are: get a Drupal.org account, update your Drupal.org account with groups.drupal.org and participate in the IRC chat on Drupal.org.
• I learned that I'm not the first person to come up with the phrase, "There's a module for that." Throughout the sessions top modules were discussed. A few interesting modules that seemed to be widely popular that I have yet to try out are: views_attach, features, panels and context.
• Drush is the key to quick and efficient development. It's almost like magic.
• Anyone can build a module; not everyone can build a good module. Some key items to look for when researching modules or building a module: HTML should not be hard coded in the module. It belongs in the template. The "t" function should be used in everything, both for security and to allow for translations, and when developing a module be aware of Drupal's use of arrays and learn to love them if you don't already.
• When Drupal 7 arrives Ubercart will no longer be the king of Drupal e-commerce. Ryan Szrama, the original developer of Ubercart, is working with his new team at The Commerce Guys to develop a new module that will blow Ubercart out of the water. When Ryan started building Ubercart he was still new to Drupal. He has learned a lot from this experience and is using that to build a new module from scratch that will use the power of Drupal 7 to introduce some amazing new technologies and allow us to more easily create powerful e-commerce sites.
• The best fried green tomatoes in Illinois are not found at the Fried Green Tomatoes Restaurant in Galena, IL. They are found at the Dixie Kitchen and Bait Shop in Evanston, IL along with some excellent southern food.

Overall the CMS Expo was a great learning experience. I would highly recommend it to anyone that is looking for a CMS or wanting to learn more about open source CMS's. View the conference website for more details and to learn about next year's Expo.