As one of two contributing editors in Technology & Web, I hope to share the fun and excitement I feel about technology with you. One way I'd like to do that is by demystifying tech talk with its never-ending stream of acronyms. This week you might find it useful to know the acronym CMS, which stands for content management system, that is, a software package for managing the creation and maintenance of documents and other content. In this article, I'll tell you a bit about the content management system being used here at BlogHer and point you to two BlogHers who are experts in the use of these powerful software packages.

Drupal, the system upon which the new BlogHer website is based, is a content management system. If you have your own blog, you're using a content management system. For example, Blogger and TypePad are content management systems combined with web hosting. Movable Type and WordPress are content management systems that you run on your own web host.

If you've spent even a few minutes browsing BlogHer's new site, you already know that Drupal offers extensive capabilities including forums, a variety of syndication feeds, user authentication, and my favorite, the recent activity display. This power isn't easy to harness, but Laura Scott of pingVision has done a tremendous job putting it together and patiently answering questions about its use. Check out Laura's personal blog rare pattern and photo blog scattered sunshine for more on Laura.

Another woman who knows her way around content management systems is New Zealander Rachel Cunliffe of cre8d design. Rachel has just written a terrific and thorough article discussing blogs vs. forums: how to architect them, the differences between them, and what CMS packages you might choose for implementing them. Rachel gives high marks to Drupal:

Drupal is brilliant in that you can categorise blog and forum content using the same taxonomy if you like, there's RSS feeds for taxomony terms, or forums, or blogs - whatever takes your fancy. You can also promote stories from the forums into the blog - and comments are all kept together. One user system for both, one theme, one lot of software to maintain. Drupal is a lot more flexible than Wordpress but has a steeper learning curve at the beginning.

When Rachel says "taxonomy" she just means the categories that are used to organize the site. Do you have categories on your blog? If so, you have a taxonomy. The per-category and blogger-specific RSS feeds available here should be very useful to those of you who use newsreaders to read all your favorite blogs in one place.

If you have particular acronyms you'd like explained or technologies you'd like me to discuss, send me a message or leave a comment here.