Opencms 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.

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.

With the release of v7.5 of the open source content management system, OpenCms (news, site), it looks like they gone through previous versions, underlined all the problems they could find, taken in-hand all reported bugs from their community, and fixed them.

Also added is a collection of new features that weren’t there before and a significant upgrade to the OpenCMS Content Relation Engine (CRE), adding some new features to something that was already quite nifty.

Developed by Alkacon Software with the help of the OpenCms community, the thing to take really note of in this release is the improvements to the CRE.

OpenCms just released version 7.0.0 of its open source content management solution. Yeah, that last .0 bugged us too.

Major features (per our very to-the-point friend Seth) include WebDAV support, a content relationship engine for dependency management, an undelete feature, and point in time previews.

That last is particularly nifty; it lets you take a glimpse of what the site looked like, or will look like, for a particular date or time. Oh, if only mirrors worked that way.