Liferay News & Articles

The web content management space is not homogeneous. And while the recently released Open Source CMS Market Share Report clearly highlighted the ongoing dominance of LAMP-based content management systems -- these systems are not the only game in town.

In this article I look at brand leaders who have chosen to build their content management software on the Java or .NET technology stacks. Systems with strong brand awareness and adoption rates include Alfresco, Jahia, Liferay and OpenCMS on the Java side, and DotNetNuke and Umbraco from the .NET camp.

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.

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.

Liferay (news, site) Portal Enterprise Edition 5.2 is now available, boosting the speed and feature-set found in the previously released Standard Edition, including benchmarked performance improvements.

Liferay, Inc., announced the version 5.2 release of Liferay Portal Standard Edition -- an open source portal platform that integrates content management, collaboration and social networking. The latest release promises enhanced performance, scalability and simplified administration. Liferay now offers a value-added commercial Enterprise Edition (EE) in addition to the open source Standard Edition (SE).

In an effort to gauge the use of open source software on the enterprise level, Alfresco turns to its rapidly growing developer community to create a biannual report of user preferences with respect to: operating systems, application servers, databases, browsers, and portals.

This report, forever known as the Open Source Barometer, is generated by collecting opt-in survey data from Alfresco community members.

For small businesses, plunking down $299/desktop for Adobe's Acrobat product has not always been an attractive solution. There are other options.

A recent posting on WebProNews has provided a full, though not complete list. If you want to create PDF reports, quotes, ebooks, or any other document to add to your website, your choices for cheap or free PDF tools are plentiful.