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Get the NewsletterSXSW Web Content Management System Showdown (Update 2)
In an Iron Chef-like match-up, a team of developers from Drupal (news, site), Joomla! (news, site) and WordPress (news, site) had 100 hours to build a website based on a specific list of specifications and design. Then representatives of each team got to meet face to face to show off their hard work during the South by Southwest Interactive festival in a session called "The Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny."
It was a battle to the end, with a mix of good humor and serious competition among developers from the open source web content management community.
How It Went Down
The room was packed full of CMS fans, with a heavy emphasis on WordPress. You could hear a small group of men chanting for their favorite CMS before the event got underway. The mood was festive, but there was an air of competition brewing as each person threw CMS taunts at each other.
The panelists included Steve Fisher (Joomla!), Colleen Carroll (Drupal), and Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) and were led by George DeMet of Palantir.net.
DeMet came up with the idea and explained how each team of developers were given the task to build a website for a community leadership program in Elgin, Illinois. The developers were asked to use a number of web-based social networking and collaboration tools. The end goal was to build websites that were general enough to be able to be downloaded by organizations and communities to meet their needs. All of the specifications are available in a PDF format.
The teams were also expected to stay true to a site design created by Mark Boulton, who is well-known for his web design and book "Five Simple Steps: A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web." Developers could only use freely-available software to build the sites and function on a shared hosting space (Linux/Apache/MySQL).
A lot of time was spent talking about how the teams worked together on the site creation and the effort it took to build the sites. The Joomla! team never met face-to-face. Developers spanned across the globe and spent most development time talking over Skype or conference calls. The Drupal team started with a face to face sprint to get the site started and then they worked online to finish the rest of the work. You can follow how Mullenweg's WordPress team completed their tasks by visiting a site they built to keep up with the project.
How the Teams Compare
Here is a comparison of how the sites came together under deadline:
| Drupal | Joomla! | WordPress | |
| Total Hours | 79.25 | 57.25 | 90.5 |
| Hours spent on front end | 21.75 | 15 | 36.5 |
| HTML Validation | No (8 errors) | Yes | No (8 errors) |
| CSS Validation | No (7 errors) | No (1 error) | No (21 errors) |
| Page weight | 180K | 140K | 154K |
| Lines of custom PHP/JS code | 220 | 30 | 1,808 |
DeMet mentioned how most validation errors were minor. But Carroll said the Drupal Community learned a lot from the discovery of those errors and they were able to put in a number of new patches to help improve the overall CMS.
Mullenweg and Fischer said this project helped in similar ways. Mullenweg talked about how his team had a great time outside of the development by adding Zoolander-related content. The added fun was not a requirement. The Drupal and Joomla! teams added filler to populate their sites.
No Live Demos, but Live User Experience
The crowd seemed pretty disappointed when it became clear there would be no live demonstrations of the websites. All of the sites can be viewed from the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny website. They did get to hear reactions from Boulton and Senior Program Officer Marybeth Schroeder from the Evanston Community Foundation.
DeMet had worked with the organization before and used its needs to launch the competition in the first place. The crowd enjoyed watching her reaction as she looked through each version of the website. Schroeder had no CMS preference before looking at the sites, a perspective that was not easy to find in the SXSW session.
There was an attempt to record how she used each site. In one screen capture video, you could see her trying to figure out the WordPress dashboard. In the case of the Joomla! site, Schroeder had a hard time adding a location for an event. In the end, she ranked the Drupal site as her first pick followed by Joomla! and WordPress.
From the designer perspective, Boulton said he favored the WordPress and Drupal sites for how they stayed true to his design. He gave Joomla! a hit for not following all of his typography. Fisher countered that they made that decision because the Joomla! team didn't like it. Boulton did not say anything specifically about the usefulness or user experience of the sites.
And the Winner Is…
In what was expected to be a dramatic end to the competition, DeMet asked the crowd to vote on who should win. Many people yelled out how they felt they did not have enough knowledge of the sites to pick. Others yelled out the CMS they already supported. That indecisiveness led to a draw. DeMet announced all three CMS won and tried to figure out a way to share the belt-buckle award.
There may be no defined answer on what is the best open source CMS. It was clear this project helped motivate the open source communities to team together and come up with products that can help non-profits launch a website that meets their needs.
Each development team will make their work available for anyone to use. The Joomla! and WordPress teams even created help videos on the showdown website. The event at SXSW was also a great way to talk about CMS and get open source products more play among a large and growing population of tech-minded people who are looking for a new way to share information online.
DeMet plans to talk about the showdown again in April at a pre-conference event for the CMS Expo in Evanston, Illinois.
About the Author
Jen Reevesis a New Media Director at KOMU.com in Columbia, Missouri. She is also an Associate Professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow.
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- Feb 17, 2010 – Webinar: 4 Essential Strategies for Advancing Your Website's Business Impact
- Feb 26, 2010 – Intelligent Content 2010
- Apr 21, 2010 – Drupalcon San Francisco 2010
- May 5, 2010 – CMS Expo 2010 (Evanston)
- Oct 7, 2010 – HartmanEVENT 2010 - Social Media & Mobile Usability
It was a great experience overall. Truth is all of us on the panel were surprised by how well each platform executed their version of the website given the time allotted. Not to water it down, but I've heard over and over that the real winner is open source.
I would absolutely echo Steve's comments and reiterate that all three CMS's in the competition brought their best game to the table, which is one of the reasons I think the audience was so reluctant to pick a winner.
While time constraints during the SXSW session prevented us from doing any live demos, this is definitely something I am planning for the reprise session at CMS Expo. We will also be making downloadable versions of the source code and installer for all three sites available in the near future from cmsshowdown.com so that people can download and evaluate them for themselves.
We also have tons of video and other materials that we're currently processing, but should all be up on the site in the coming days. Thanks again to everyone who helped make this project such a great success!
Excellent, excellent panel. Joomla, Drupal and WordPress are each excellent CMS solutions with their own set of strengths. All three core teams should be proud of how far they've come in a few short years. Looking forward to the "rematch" shootout in chi-town at CMS Expo.
I love that Open Source wins! But having the Audience award the winner is kind of silly with so much hype!
If you look at the over all stats Joomla pulled in front in every category.
Long Live Open Source! Long Live The King Joomla!
Looking at your chart stats, isn't Joomla the clear winner?
* least amount of custom code
* fewest validation errors
* lightest page
* only one of three to have validated HTML
* fastest to implement by a matter of 20 hours over Drupal, and 33 hours less than Wordpress!
If these stats are the right benchmarks, Joomla won hands down.
I was a little bummed that Joomla had little to no presence at SXSW Interactive 09. Maybe next year! They also need a bigger ballroom for the Open source CMS fans!! I got stuck way in the back on the floor and missed most of the conversation :-(
I thought WP will be outright winner. But ofcourse unless one sees the specs and the product no judgement can be given,
Really neat competition and wonderful work by all. If any one is interested, I wrote a blog post on some of my thoughts for the three sites. For instance: It looked to me like Wordpress was the only one of the sites to implement a forum. What gives? :-)
http://www.bluebridgedev.com/blog/content-management-showdown
Both the Drupal and Joomla! Web sites have the discussion forums and individual blogs hidden, unless you are logged on. The specs indicated that those features should be hidden from view. Might be good to share a video demo with George to publish on the CMS Showdown sites.
There's been quite a bit of confusion given that the spec for the site explicitly required that large amounts of functionality be invisible to anonymous visitors. The Wordpress version of the site has a publicly visible forum because it was the only site to completely ignore the access controls the spec laid out. :-)
While Joomla has the lowest number of lines of custom code, this was not a statistics competition. The facts that a) the customer found it hard to do certain tasks with Joomla and b) the Joomla team failed to adhere to the specifications clearly count against it. So what's more important to a client?
All three sites implemented forums, but as per the project spec, the Drupal and Joomla! sites did not make them visible to anonymous users.
I'd hope to see www.silverstripe.org CMS being there next year - it has a much more modern CMS interface and is far better engineered. (object oriented code, PHP5, etc.)
Nice idea, it's a shame they didn't open the invites out to some of the other open source CMSs like Plone.
-Matt
Just wanted to clarify my position on the typography and the Joomla! teams comment.
The reason I felt the Wordpress and Drupal had the edge design wise was that they kept true to the typography that was specified. The design was purposefully clean and simplistic, with a strong sense of whitespace. By deviating from that, the overall relationships with bodies of type are lost, the hierarchy is undermined and important subtleties are lost. An example of this is the italics used throughout the design. They were specified as Lucida Sans, which has a true italic. The Joomla! team decided to change that to an oblique Helvetica/Arial. This is not only a different weight, but a completely different typeface.
So, really, it's not a case of liking or disliking the typography. It's about sticking to what is considered and correct. ;)
Yeah. I was misquoted above, which is unfortunate.
"Fisher countered that they made that decision because the Joomla! team didn't like it."
I LOVED the design and the typography. The typography changes were a mistake (sorry Mark). The portions I talked about during the panel that I changed and believed I did to improve the user experience were things like there was no search and rounded corners on the buttons.
Very grateful to you Mark for the amazing design and when we actually release the Joomla! version I will ensure it is to your spec.
Or how about this: http://www.edinburghcastle.gov.uk/ built from HTML markup in 112.5 hours. Commercial software (Open Text Livelink WCM - aka Obtree).
As a huge supporter of all three options it was nice to see that they all experienced some errors. Lets the public know work will continue. Also great to see what started as a blog platform competing directly with well established CMSs.
Based on the findings chart, Joomla! does appear the winner, but without the ability to see the actual sites in action it's difficult to determine which one won out right.
I would like to see another showdown that includes more open source CMSs. Plone was mentioned above but based on the fact that Plone is Zope and Python and not PHP will make it a tough comparison. But there is CMSmadesimple, Xoops, Silverstripe, ImpressCMS and many more.