Last year SupaJam ran a contest to offer an unsigned band the chance to play at a huge music festival in Spain. They got over a thousand entries and one lucky band got flown out to Spain for a few days and got to play live at the festival.

This year the SupaJam site has been revamped and the new FIB contest has already been running for a couple of weeks. This year's contest looks set to be even bigger and better. They are already fast approaching the number of entries from last year and there are still a few weeks left to enter.

As I don't think many of the (2 or 3) people who read this blog actually play in a band...

Last year SEOSS was looking after the servers running the site and we had some limited involvement in keeping an eye on the development of the site. The actual development was outsourced to an Indian company who chose to base it on Typo3. By the time they had finished, there wasn't really very much of Typo3 actually visible, pretty much all of the site was custom extensions.

This year I have taken on a far more active role. SEOSS is still looking after the servers involved, however now I am personally managing the development (done by a small outsourced team and myself). This time around I have based the site on Social Web CMS, although there is still an awful lot of custom code involved.

We've still got a lot of exciting features in the development plan, plus a few rough edges to sort out. But the site is live and running well.

On that point, a slight aside - last year serving the homepage (which at that time was far simpler with less dynamic news content) to the local machine took approximately 1 second. This time around, the homepage takes just 0.1 seconds to serve to the local machine!

Both systems use PHP. The hardware, operating system and database have not changed. In theory the new system pays less attention to caching (we haven't optimised much yet) and it includes more dynamic content on the homepage. So my conclusion is not really a recommendation for SWCMS, but instead a warning to avoid Typo3!