Every year I plan my shopping ahead of time and buy as much online as possible and do it at a reasonably early point. In this way, on Saturday I had to get three gifts, possibly four and another two were yet to be delivered (they arrived this morning). So, given that I already knew what I needed, I planned to spend all day in Cardiff. Eh, what?

I can’t be doing with all this rushing around. It’s far too stressful. By doing most of my shopping online, I know I’ve only got a few small items to get. So I get a group of friends and we wander around town all day. We go for a big fried breakfast at Calcio’s. We stand in queues chatting and catching up, not minding the time. We wander around the stalls of the Cardiff Christmas Market tasting mulled wine, whisky mead, sloe gin, cheese, nuts and crepes. We ooh and aah at the quality of the hand-crafted items. We spend ages pottering around that second hand bookstore not minding the time at all. And if the crowds get a bit much, we head into a coffee shop where we split up – one party goes to nab a table and one to the queue, so that by the time the drinks are ready we’ve somewhere to sit. We organise it so that friends can pop in and join us for a bit and then toddle off or whatever. Basically it makes for a fantastically relaxing time. I thoroughly enjoyed Saturday wandering around Cardiff with a host of friends. The evening was also festive as I popped over to Dan’s for a coffee and then headed back home where Mal came over for munchies and a DVD (Team America: World Police [2004]).

Sunday started abruptly with the pager going off around 0800 though, but before I’d hit base, we’d been stood down from this search. I toddled off home and invited Jon for lunch but the pagers delayed that again as I headed back to base while we were on standby to rescue a dog. That didn’t take too long and I headed back to chat with Jon, eat food and watch Taxi with Queen Latifah. Finally a quick trip over to Rich’s turned into a 5-hour session of playing with computers, D&D and A/V kit. Finally, I spent the early hours of this morning reading a fantastic book (Sniper One: The Blistering True Story of a British Battle Group Under Siege ).

I had a cracking weekend, lots of Christmas spirit and friendship and it was great to catch up with people. This method of shopping is highly recommended.

Taking everything back to first principles, we got a bunch of people together and tried to work out what we actually want from a website. It rapidly became very clear that the website was key to how we communicated not only with team members, but with external organisations. With that in mind, we decided that a complete redesign of the site was in order, with different sections of the website for different people – members, other 999 services, the press, the public, prospective members etc. That’s a whole lot of work and more importantly, is a layout that isn’t compatible with one person doing all the work. So we need a CMS of some sort.

Over the past few days I’ve been trawling through some CMS software. Specifically I’ve been looking at Open Source ones in order to provide flexibility and keep costs down. It has to be easy to use so that people can publish content. It has to be customisable and templates fairly simple to play with. I’ve looked at over 20 different CMSes and several names stick out as software that’s competent, well-written and easy to use while at the same time being flexble:

• WordPress – technically not a CMS, it is nevertheless very popular and has an extremely simple interface. It isn’t however powerful enough for some of the things we want to do.
• Joomla – this is currently one of my top runners. Very competent CMS from looking at it, it’s one of two going forward to the trial stage.
• Mambo – Very close 3rd, it just lacks a few features compared to Joomla that I wanted.
• TikiWiki CMS – This was recommended to me, but following reviews and comparisons, it’s probably bottom of the shortlist
• Drupal – Currently the top runner. My once concern is its complexity, but if the complexity is limited to the admin side, that’s fine – I’ll be the admin so I don’t mind learning my way around.

I suppose I’m fairly lucky that in my last job I worked for a company that wrote a CMS so I’m familiar with certain concepts and principles relating to CMSes – personalisation, taxonomy, navigation, content types, etc. That will probably hold me in good stead as I set up Drupal and Joomla for trialling. Hopwefully a clear winner will emerge from the two, though at the moment, Drupal is almost a full head in front of Joomla after just reading the docs.