Report in Depth: Most Popular Open Source CMS 2009

On Friday we announced the release of the second annual 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. The project was a collaboration with water & stone, an APAC-based interactive agency. The initial announcement addressed what the report covers, its purpose and some key highlights.

For the sake of disclosure, while I did look over the preliminary survey and advise on some tweaks, I otherwise wasn't involved in this report and am looking at this data with fresh eyes and no particular bias from the side of CMSWire.

Now let's take a look more in depth.

The Criteria

The authors of the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report made efforts this year refine the selected CMS's over last year's choices — both in terms of including a broader range of programming languages (.NET and Java-based CMS's as well as PHP), and ensuring that those projects chosen are similar enough that they can be compared apples to apples (all Web CMS's) rather than spreading out to too many different types of tools (this time social networking systems and wikis were not included).

In particular, the report's authors point out that this report in no way represents which system is best, the most full-featured or the most powerful. Its focus is strictly on market share and brand strength. The content management systems considered were:

• Alfresco
• CMS Made Simple
• DotNetNuke
• Drupal
• e107
• eZ Publish
• Jahia
• Joomla
• Liferay
• MODx
• OpenCms
• phpWebSite
• Plone
• SilverStripe
• Textpattern
• TikiWiki
• Typo3
• Umbraco
• WordPress
• Xoops

Changes in Methodology Generate Meaningful Numbers

For the 2008 report, data was gathered through Twitter mentions and social bookmarking statistics. This year, water & stone teamed up with CMSWire to present a survey to their readers. Doing so gave the authors targeted data to interpret from more than 600-1200 people (depending on the question asked). Don't expect to see comparative metrics in the 2009 report for these numbers, as there's nothing from 2008 to compare them against.

According to the survey results, the typical participant is a 35 to 44-year-old male in North America, with a graduate degree or higher. He's worked in IT for 10 to 15 years and still works in the computer, software, or technology fields. His annual household income is between US$51,000 and US$100,000, he works for a small organization of 1 to 5 people.

Areas considered were rate of adoption and brand strength.

Pros and Cons of the Methodology

While there were survey results to deal with, it's helpful to get data through other avenues as well, to both correct for any bias in your survey sample and in general get a broader picture of the world you're exploring.

The problem is that with survey results, you've designed the questions so that you can get some sensible measurements out of them. With real-world data, this desire doesn't come so easily. For example, in measuring the rate of adoption through looking at download metrics, the authors ran into a number of hairy issues. These issues are detailed in the report.

To summarize:

• You can't get data on the number of downloads for every project
• Even when you can get the data, the time scales the data covers differ wildly

For some projects the number of downloads are counted from the beginning of time. With others, they may be counted just for a particular major version or point release. Some don't give you any idea of what the time scale is at all.

Once you deal with these two issues, you also have to face:

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Tags: alfresco, cms market share, document management, drupal, jahia, joomla, liferay, market share, modx, open source, open source cms, phpwebsite, plone, textpattern, tikiwiki, water & stone, web cms, wordpress, xoops

On Friday we announced the release of the second annual 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. The project was a collaboration with water & stone, an APAC-based interactive agency. The initial announcement addressed what the report covers, its purpose and some key highlights.

For the sake of disclosure, while I did look over the preliminary survey and advise on some tweaks, I otherwise wasn't involved in this report and am looking at this data with fresh eyes and no particular bias from the side of CMSWire.

Now let's take a look more in depth.