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I have been in Chicago for 2 days now for CMS Expo 2010. Let me say that this is an outstanding conference! Very well organized, a lot of great speakers, a lot of great people, great food, great everything!

For me, it was a wonderful opportunity to finally meat with someone I’ve been working with for the past 5 years, Steve Kenow, one of the initiators of the ImpressCMS project. We have been working together since in the XOOPS days and started the ImpressCMS adventure together with other great people. We’ve been talking to each other nearly every week for the past few year, but yet again, I had still to meet with him! This was accomplished this week!

I also met with Steve M., another dedicated XOOPS and ImpressCMS user/developer. It’s so nice to meet with people sharing the same interest, in this case, open source CMS. Although CMS users and developers represent a large number of people across the world, you don’t connect with them in real life every day.

So far, the conference was a great way to meet with a lot of people using CMS. The 3 same players come back all the time: Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. But it’s great to see people very committed to these CMS actually interested in other systems. We also met with a few vendors currently offering professional services around Drupal and Joomla, who were also interested in learning more about ImpressCMS.

It was also a very good time to discuss with the 2 Steve’s about where ImpressCMS is and where it should go.Roadmaps were mentioned quite a few time but we came to a very clear conclusion: Roadmaps are overrated. And Steve K. already blogged about this earlier today.

Roadmaps are a list of features that needs to be implemented for a specific date. This holds 2 problems: a list of features, and dates. Features needs change through time. How can me know today, what feature we will need in a year ? The web evolves so quickly, new technologies, new ways of doing thing, new tools get created every day. So, actually, tomorrow, we will have more information about what we really want to add in our product. Then why corner ourself with a list of features and dates which would become irrelevant in 2 weeks ?

Another important element explaining why Roadmaps are problematic is that people need passion to create greatness. Developers need passion to create genious code, designers need passion to create outstanding designs, etc. If we write in a stone the specific things we want to do, then we need to find people passionate enough about each individual item to make it happen. Why not do the opposite ? Ask what people want to create today, and let them do it!

But then again, we don’t want to create “free for all”! This is why we need a vision. We need general guidelines, general concepts to guide people and guide the orientation of the project. Like a compass. And this is coming very soon…

Anyway, great conference so far. I’m sad that tomorrow is already the last day! but we will be back next year, you can count on it !