John and Linda Coonen, organizers of the CMS expo to be held for its seventh year in May, told us about their plans for this year. Not just for developers, the expo has sessions for business owners and marketers trying to understand how a website can help them grow. Visit CMSexpo.net for speakers, sessions, and to register.

They started in the CMS world as leaders of the Joomla User Group, and they shared with us a few tips for growing our group. John relayed a saying of his dad's, "Nothing happens until the sale" and that its all about marketing the group. Linda added that the personal invite is key to getting people to the meetings. They held their meetings at lunch time and found a sponsor to cover lunch. They split the meeting into newbie and experienced and had topics pertenant to each, which got the two groups wondering what was going on in the other's meeting and so they then held the topics serially. The meetings grew from an hour to three one-hour sessions and some people stayed for all three. We'll need to digest some of these observations to determine what would be helpful for us, and we certainly appreciate their insight and the time they spent with us.

Scott Wilkinson from DotNetNuclear shared his work with CSS to make DNN sites work across mobile and desktops alike. The term to remember if you're not into coding but want a site that looks nice on your iPhone is "responsive." Make sure your website developer uses responsive design techniques. In the case of DNN, where the look of the site is mostly dictated by the "skin," there's still content being displayed via modules. Even when you choose a skin that's responsive, the module may not comply. So there's a bit of work to ensure a good mobile experience.

Take a look at Scott's presentation on is website DotNetNuclear.com. 

Our thanks to our speakers and to all our attendees who "hungout" with us last night. For a Chicago user group meeting, we had attendees from Boston, California, Washington, and even Nova Scotia (ACK!) Great to see you all there.

As for our snaffu, we created an event and realized shortly before the meeting that there was no way to make the hangout On Air. So we created a new event and marked it "on Air" so google would record it, but then when we went to start the hangout on air, there was no link to it! We finally got a hangout started that was also On Air, but of course all the folks had received the first event notice and went straight to that hangout. Oh well, we'll figure this this out eventually. Any google hangout experts that can explain how to set up an On Air Hangout Event, we'd appreciate it!

Our March meeting will be an on-site one, and we're looking for a host. Let us know if you know somebody that can accommodate a dozen folks, and we'll set the location, but of course, the date is the first Tuesday of the month.