E107 News & Articles

Water&stone has released their annual Open Source CMS Market Share Report. Who is dominating the open source web content management space? And who managed to move ahead of other contenders? Find out here.

For most of us, a good day is being able to go about our business without any annoyances getting in our way. Unfortunately, when your business involves the Internet, mere annoyances rate much higher on the "good" scale than, say, discovering your Web CMS was hacked at least six months ago and you've been leaking critical user data like a sieve.

If that user data involves sensitive information such as medical data, credit card numbers, bank account information or anything else that is subject to either regulations or sleepless nights over losing your shirt, you should at least investigate security add-ons.

Following on the heels of the 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, this year we collaborated with water&stone to produce an improved 2009 version. The report is an interesting study of 20 dominant systems in the market. It's really not about which CMS is best, nor about relative comparisons beyond brand strength, sentiment and adoption patterns. We're aware of this.

Traditional and Social Media Analysis

What the study did was sniff around the nooks and crannies of our increasingly electronic and publicly broadcast lives and endeavor to quantify the relative brand strengths, brand sentiments and adoption patterns for the top 20 most popular content management products. In addition, we ran a survey on CMSWire.com a little ways back. With this tool we were able to directly pose questions to our readership -- and more than 1200 of you took to the task (thank you!).

This year's analysis looked at Alfresco, CMS Made Simple, DotNetNuke, Drupal, e107, eZ Publish, Jahia, Joomla, Liferay, MODx, OpenCms, phpWebSite, Plone, SilverStripe, Textpattern, TikiWiki, Typo3, Umbraco and WordPress.

Key Conclusions: 3 Dominate, Many Are Vibrant

What jumped quickly out is that The Big Three -- Joomla, WordPress and Drupal -- led the survey set across a wide range of measures. However, the top slots are not static, Joomla has gained market share over Drupal, and WordPress with its hosted version has what looks like a smoother path to adoption.

The report identifies less obvious stars. Alfresco, a vendor focused on both document management and web content management, performed well across a number of categories, and led the Java-based open source CMS race over its nearest rival, Liferay. DotNetNuke led the .NET-based open source CMS category, though Umbraco is up and coming.

The report goes on to identify reasons why DotNetNuke's position may soon be changing. In addition to naming the market leaders, the study identifies projects whose market share and brand metrics indicate they are at risk or facing a closing window of opportunity. A metric we found of particular interest was the product evaluation rates versus the adoption rates.

The 90+ page report is available for free and includes profiles of each of the systems covered.

As Packt Press continues to rattle off the awards this week, its Joomla’s turn in the spotlight. Today’s prize is for “Best PHP Open Source Content Management System”.

Quoting the Packt site, “Joomla! is possibly one of the biggest success stories in open source of late. Its first release came in only September 2005 and since then has grown to be one of the most downloaded Content Management Systems on the web.”

The runners up in this category were Drupal and e107 respectively. Previous winners this week were WordPress for Best Open Source Social Networking CMS and mojoPortal for Best Other Open Source Content Management System.

And the fun’s not over yet. No sir. Rolling right along you avid CMS’ers have both the Most Promising Open Source CMS award and the Overall Winner award to look forward to.