Alert: What's Coming In Open Source CMS In 2011

Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month, keeping you up to date with the open source CMS and other related projects that might interest you. Like last year, we're taking a look back at 2010 and into 2011 for some extra insights into what's to come, but this time around we used a small survey to see what's in the hearts and minds of open source project leaders.

The Respondents

When we sent out our questions, 23 projects responded. When asked how they would classify their project, we allowed multiple answers since today many of today's players have offerings that span multiple classifications.

The most popular responses were:

• Web CMS / Web Publishing / Web Community - 74%
• Enterprise CMS / Document Management / Info Management - 52%
• Intranet Portal - 44%
• Enterprise Collaboration / Enterprise Social / Innovation Management - 22%

More specialized classifications included Web Engagement / Web Optimization / Sentiment Analysis at 9% and both Digital Asset Management and Enterprise Search tied at 4%.

Even with our broad classifications, 22% answered Other. Explanations include:

• A CMIS-based platform for building Composite Content Applications by configuration
• A web development framework
• A collaborative knowledge platform
• Document scanning and intelligent document capture
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

How the respondents classify their projects and products.

Economics and Growth Plans

Economically, about 44% of the respondents were strongly positive about 2011, with 39% somewhat positive and the rest being cautiously neutral. Many cited the lower costs of open source software as driving more organizations to their doorsteps.

When asked what parts of the world their projects and organizations are targeting as a high priority for growth in 2011:

• North America - 91%
• Europe - 70%
• Asia Pacific/Oceania - 36%
• South America and the Middle East - Tied at 19%

The picture is very different if you look at medium priorities:

• Middle East - 38%
• South America - 33%
• Asia Pacific/Oceania - 32%
• Europe - 26%
• North America - 8%

In the realm of low priorities, the lowest was South America at 33% with the Middle East at 29% and Asia Pacific at 18%. Specific countries people are targeting include Brazil, France, and the UK.

Enhancement Plans

Respondents have big plans for enhancing their projects in 2011. When asked which areas they'll be adding or improving, high priorities included:

• Improve General Usability - 78%
• Additional APIs / Integration / Platform Features and Social / Engagement / Personalization / Optimization Features - Tied at 64%
• Address Performance and Scalability Limits - 52%
• Better Mobile Device and/or Multi-Channel Support - 48%
• CMIS Enhancements - 29%

There's also a strong list of mid-range priorities, those items that developers would love to get to if resources and time allow:

• Semantic Web Features (e.g., RDFa, Semantic intelligence, etc.) - 55%
• Better Mobile Device and/or Multi-Channel Support - 39%
• Address Performance and Scalability Limits - 35%
• Additional APIs / Integration / Platform Features - 32%
• JCR Enhancements - 25%
• CMIS Enhancements - 24%
• Social / Engagement / Personalization / Optimization Features - 18%
• Improve General Usability - 17%

The lowest priorities are JCR Enhancements (35%), CMIS Enhancements (33%) and Semantic Web Features (e.g., RDFa, Semantic intelligence, etc.) (30%). JCR Enhancements were by far the biggest N/A answer at 35%, no doubt because they only apply for projects based on Java. Further explanations include easy document access from Windows systems, content collaboration, Microsoft (news, site) FrontPage editing, web intelligence, HTML5, better multimedia integration, documentation improvements, a touch-specific GUI, and Enterprise Workflow/BPM.

Questions And Prognostications

After asking the fun statistics-gathering questions, we got into the more detailed discussion of what each project is up to. Rather than breaking it out by project as I usually do, I thought instead I'd group the responses to each question for easy comparison.

If you don't see your favorite project, it's not for lack of trying, we went out numerous requests for responses. Maybe for a New Year's Resolution you could nudge your project to answer us more often!

Looking Back At 2010

Before getting into what's to come, let's take a look back over 2010. One of the questions asked of the respondents was, "What 2 things are you most proud of your project/product achieving in 2010?" Here's the breakdown of what the projects had to say:

• Alfresco: The "overwhelmingly positive reception" to their developer conferences in Paris and New York.
• Calenco: The stability they've achieved for their product.
• dotCMS: Their enterprise-level multi-tenant marketplace success, and managing to break into the global marketplace with dotCMS v1.9.
• DotNetNuke: New product features such as a new localized content management capability and the addition of the Telerik RadEditor to the open source version of their platform. They're particularly happy that they managed to deploy enhanced QA tools and procedures at the same time. For commercial accomplishments, they exceeded 1,000 subscription customers and experienced nearly 400% growth through the year.
• Drupal: There were no long-form answers from the Drupal project in general, but we did get some from Drupal company Acquia. They're proud of releasing the beta their SaaS product Drupal Gardens (news, site) and growing it to hosting more than 29,000 sites.
• Ephesoft: Implementing CMIS integration, and enabling content-based classification for scanned documents, faxes and emails.
• eZ Publish: Adding multichannel capabilities and a variety of enterprise features such as a service platform and patch management.
• Hippo CMS: Features around internationalization, their REST interface, their plugin architecture, and scalability both horizontal and vertical.
• Lucid Imagination: Achieving a high rate of acceptance among brand-name fortune 1000 companies and of their "highly active" community of developers and adopters.
• Magnolia CMS: Continuing their trend of 50% annual growth, their two major releases, and the caliber of the team they've built.
• Melody: Growing their active contributor base by 2-3x, and making so many advances for the core platform.
• Nuxeo: Releasing Nuxeo Studio (the lightweight IDE for content-centric applications based on Nuxeo) and Nuxeo Marketplace (their app store).
• Sense/Net: The popularity of their Windows Workflow Foundation Integration feature, and moving their development teams to using the SCRUM methodology to speed up taking new features to market.
• SilverStripe: Achieving the first Microsoft Certification for an open source project, and the act that their software powers more and more complex sites.
• Tiki Wiki: Winning the BOSSIE award and increasing community involvement to stay "one of the largest collaborative open source projects in the world."
• TYPO3: Improved usability features in the current branch, and developing the next generation of their platform together with their framework.
• Umbraco: Reaching profitability through organic growth and no venture capital, and keeping the community feeling friendly as it doubled in size.
• WeWebU: Going open source with OpenWorkdesk, and adding CMIS support.
• Wiredcraft: Performance gains and mobile apps.
• WordPress: While there weren't general responses from the WordPress project, we did get answers from WordPress company Automattic. Their response was the scale of WordPress deployments, with partners serving "hundreds of millions of pageviews/month" on the platform, and the level of adoption of WordPress mobile apps across Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Nokia and Windows Phone 7.
• XOOPS: The most important was rewriting the next generation of XOOPS with the Zend Framework. As part of joining mainstream PHP-based web development trends, they're also heavily using Smarty 3.0 and jQuery, the jQuery transition was made for XOOPS 2.5.0. Finally, for 2010 they're proud to receive the 2010 OSS Award Northeast Asia Open Source Software Promotion Forum award, and to be a finalist for Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award.

What They Want For 2011

Another question put to the vendors and projects was, "What are the top 2 things you want to achieve for your project/product in 2011?" Here's what folks had to say: 

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Tags: acquia, alfresco, calenco, dotcms, dotnetnuke, drupal, enterprise cms, ephesoft, ez publish, foss updates, hippo cms, lucid imagination, magnolia, melody, nuxeo, open source, sensenet, silverstripe, tiki, typo3, umbraco, web cms, wewebu, wiredcraft, wordpress, xoops

Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month, keeping you up to date with the open source CMS and other related projects that might interest you. Like last year, we're taking a look back at 2010 and into 2011 for some extra insights into what's to come, but this time around we used a small survey to see what's in the hearts and minds of open source project leaders.