Well, our little prank worked well... we hooked alot of you guys who just weren't quite sure if this was a prank or not.. and even a couple of you that forgot the dates. We managed to get this spread throught the inter-web as well, and the traffic on the server has been going nuts today. It's amazing how quickly news can travel with twitter and RSS. CMSMS is not being acquired by intuit, we're continuing on as normal. All of you that got tricked can now breathe. Happy April Fools Everybody. ------------------ Intuit a provider of on-line and off-line solutions aimed at the small business owner is pleased to announce the complete acquisition of the award winning web content management system 'CMS Made Simple (CMSMS)'. In an entirely cash transaction Intuit gains all rights and ownership to the CMS Made Simple source code, websites, ancillary software, images, documents and reference materials. Negotiations have occurred with key members of the open source packages development team that constitute the experience and knowledge base of CMSMS to allow an easy transfer of knowledge to the new corporate environment. Intuit feels that CMSMS's design goals of providing a web content management system designed to allow business owners a simple and easy way of managing their online presence is an ideal fit with its portfolio of products (both online and off-line) aimed at small business owners. The knowledge and techniques that have been integrated into CMS Made Simple will assist Intuit in providing additional services to their target customers. CMS Made Simple will be migrated to become an essential component of Intuits hosted solutions. Tentatively named 'SITES Made Simple' the package will continue provide small business owners with a simple, easy to use, secure, reliable, and flexible mechanism for providing a complete online presence for their business. As part of their web presense solution package Intuit will be offering reseller programs, training instructors, and offering a certification program for website developers within the year. Intuit will continue to operate the CMSMS forums, to support the CMSMS user community, and to provide security fixes, bug fixes and enhancements for the foreseeable future. Intuit sees the open source model that has been successful for CMS Made Simple as essential to providing a stable, quality product for those that prefer a hosted, problem free, low cost solution. For an undisclosed sum, Ted Kulp has been retained on a part-time basis as a technical advisor. He will assist in training Intuits staff with CMSMS's designs, API's and methodologies. During this period Ted wishes to spend more time with his family, and may even go back to some recreational welding. As well, Robert Campbell author of the popular FrontEndUsers, CGCalendar, CompanyDirectory and other modules, has sold to the new owner of CMS Made Simple an unlimited right to use for all of his modules. Robert will continue to develop the modules and support CMS Made Simple after he returns from a nice long, much overdue vacation in Asia. Ted had this to say about the acquisition: "A great deal of effort has gone into CMSMS. It's a mature product in use on tens of thousands of websites around the world, I'm proud of it. It's also been six years now that I've been doing this, and I feel that it's about time to try some of the other things I am interested in. I feel good about Intuit and their team, they'll be able to take the package to places I just didn't have the time or energy to go. I'm looking forward to seeing it in a year or two." When asked his opinion Robert responded: "I've used some of Intuits stuff in the past, they know what they're doing. And I see where they're going with the on-line web presence stuff. I think CMSMS will be a good foundation for them, and it'll be great for the product. Hopefully the certification program will help keep some of the wannabe web developers from asking dumb questions on the forum... then the signal to noise ratio can go back up and we'll have a good team of professionals providing quality service instead of the hap-hazard stuff we've seen to often". All interested parties have made commitments to retain the image of easy to use software and applications that both CMSMS and Intuit have diligently maintained. The rapid growth and forward thinking of CMS Made Simple coupled with Intuit's tenure and industry leading software is expected to take site development and content management to the next step.