The CMS Evaluations
Introduction
Contain Management Systems (CMS) have become more and more dominant trend of development in today’s co-operate businesses. Content and feature rich websites Content Management Systems (CMS) are the engines that bring your website to life. CMS not only allow you to easily create and edit content but play an increasingly important role in deploying powerful interactive functionality.
It is very much important fact that you choose the right CMS in the beginning. Unfortunately changing the web site will going to cost you a lot while it is up and running. There are hundreds of different CMS available, so it can be challenging to find the best solution. CMS are technical, complex applications.
As a helping hand for the user as well as to check the growth of each CMS, an evaluation, comparison and awards are been published each year. Its guide you on your quest for the best CMS. The goal of the CMS Intelligence Report is to gather all the pieces and attempt to put them together in a way that reveals the big picture.
CMS Evaluations
For the 2010 CMS Intelligence Report, we incorporated the findings of seven primary evaluations augmented by several secondary reports. The evaluations can be essentially divided into two categories: popularity and feature evaluations.
walter&stone, CMSWire Open Source CMS Market Share Report
The 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report by walter&stone and CMSWire is an in‐depth analysis of market share and brand strength. It uses a well conceived multivariate academic approach. Like many of the reports we included, it offers a distinct viewpoint; what CMS is the most popular. While not directly evaluating which system is best, most powerful or full featured, we feel this is a good indicator of the quality of a CMS.
The report focuses on 20 CMS deemed the top based on an initial analysis. The CMS that made the cut were:
Reference: http://www.cmswire.com/downloads/cms‐market‐share
Open Source CMS Awards
Packet Publishing, a top publisher of technical web books, has conducted a contest to determine the top open source CMS. Finalists are selected by user voting. Then expert judges select the winning CMS. 23,000 votes were cast in the 2009 awards.
In the first three years of the awards, 2006‐2008, Drupal and Joomla! won top honors. In2009, Packt created a new Hall of Fame Award category. Hall of Fame winners were excluded from wining Overall Best. For the most recent 2009 rankings, effectively the top selections were:
1. Drupal
2. Joomla!
3. WordPress
4. MODx
4. SilverStripe
Reference: http://www.packtpub.com/award
NTEN CMS satisfaction Report
NTEN is a leading organization for non-profit technology professionals. Their mission is to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and information within the non-profit community.
Reference: http://www.nten.org/blog/2008/05/29/nten‐content‐management‐system‐satisfactionreport‐now‐available
Forrester Web Content Management and Open Source Report
Essentially, the Forrester report is seeking to answer the question “Are there any next generation open source CMSs powerful, scalable, and reliable, e.g. safe, enough for enterprise demands?”
Forrester evaluated CMS based on three primary factors:
1. Satisfaction of project offering
2. Existing enterprise‐level implementations
3. Strength of community support
Forrester singled out only two open source CMS, Alfresco and Drupal, to which “CIOs and CTOs need to pay particular attention”.
Specific reasons were:
• Both have taken pages from the commercial vendors’ playbooks [i.e., enterprise-class support, stability, etc.]
• Technologist praise the product architectures
• Both have strong professional communities
Reference: http://forrester.com/rb/Research/web_content_management_and_open_source/q/id/
46162/t/2
IBM developer Works Using opens source software
IBM’s Using Open source software is a series of articles about using open source todesign, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site. These articles provide insight into how a world class enterprise consultancy evaluates open source solutions. What is interesting is that IBM is essentially evaluating alternatives to their own enterprise class CMS, WebSphere.
For the series, IBM evaluated seven solutions:
• Drupal
• Mambo / Joomla
• Movable Type
• Ruby on Rails
• TextPattern
• Typo3
• WordPress
Reference: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i‐osource1
Webology Drupal vs. Joomla! Survey
Webology conducted a survey of CMS experienced web professional to compare their opinions of Drupal and Joomla!. Out of the 196 respondents 84 (42.9%) said they were more experienced with Joomla!, 70 (35.7%) with Drupal and 42 (21.4%) with other CMS. One of the more unique pieces of information in the survey was the average budget of websites built on each platform.
Reference: http://www.webologysolutions.com/ebusiness‐blog/Drupal‐vs‐Joomla‐Question‐
Responses.html
Secondary Evaluations
This section contains several additional evaluations used to provide insight in our final recommendations.
SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards
SourceForge.net is the world’s largest open source software development website. In 2008 they conducted a Community Choice Awards where top projects were determined by voting by their more than two‐million registered users.
Reference: http://sourceforge.net/blog/cca08‐finalists/
CNET Webware 100
The Webware 100 identifies 100 Web applications voted “the best of the best” by CNET readers. For 2009 over 5000 votes were cast.
These awards are interesting because server side CMS are in open competition against thousands of available solutions including hosted publishing solutions and social media sites. In the Social & Publishing category, two CMS received inclusion in the top 100; Drupal
The full list of winners in the Social & Publishing category are:
• Bebo
• Drupal
• Facebook
• Gaia Online
• Hi5
• Meebo
• MySpace
• StarDoll
• Twitter
• WordPress.com
Drupal and WordPress also won in 2008, the only server side CMS to make the list.
The awards can be found at:
http://www.cnet.com/100
Feature comparisons
Consumer Reports style feature comparisons are a popular format for comparing CMSs. They list various features and how well each CMS meets the criteria. Feature comparisons enable you to quickly compare CMS functionality in an easy to understand format. However, their quick analysis with simple Yes / No answer is often an oversimplification providing only surface level insight into nuanced technically complex questions.
CMS Matrix customizable comparison of over a hundred CMSs:
http://www.cmsmatrix.org
Web 2.0 business site
Web 2.0 sites incorporate advanced interactive features. Web 2.0 sites are not just for passive reading, they are meant to engage customers into an interactive experience. They typically include collaborative knowledge or community oriented sections such as blogs, wikis, forums and knowledgebase’s. Visitors can interact with this content through commenting, rating, tagging, flagging, etc. Some sites even allow visitors to publish their own content. Web 2.0 sites are often integrated with the social cloud, sites
such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other blogs. Drupal is the top choice. It is designed from the ground up to be a community platform and offers the most advanced Web 2.0 features. If you are on a tight budget, Joomla! can be a viable alternative. Joomla! does have some useful Web 2.0 modules. However, the quantity and flexibility are a distant second to Drupal. If you do plan to go the Joomla! route, avoid feature customization otherwise Joomla!’s cost advantages will disappeared quickly.
Best choice:
1. Drupal
2. Joomla!
Enterprise class websites
Large enterprises have much of the same needs as SMBs but everything is bigger and more complex. The Enterprise is the most demanding of environments and suitable CMS have to deliver a wealth of features while maintaining a mission critical level of reliability and scalability. Any production problem must be able to be remedied quickly thus 24×7 enterprise class support is a must. Beyond performance, there are some advanced features enterprises value more than smaller organizations. Content is usually managed by teams of knowledge workers necessitating advanced user permissions and content workflows. CMS may be required to integrate with other legacy systems. Enterprises tend to have an appetite and budget
Best choice:
1. Tie: EWCM, Drupal
2. Plone
Non-profit sites
Non profit sites have many of the same core needs as business sites. However, nonprofits typical need to integrate donations/ecommerce and constituent relationship
management systems (CRM). Many non‐profit sites contain awareness, advocacy or volunteer sections that could benefit from Web 2.0 features. Social media is playing an increasingly important role in non‐profit marketing and awareness. An ideal CMS would enable you to integrate and better leverage social media.
Best choice
1. Drupal
2. Joomla!
3. WordPress / Plone
Online community / Social media
Social media covers a very wide range of sites. In general they can be described as web applications that enable online communities to publish content and connect with each other. Features typically include:
• User registration
• User profiles
• Friends / user relationships
• User generated content
• Commenting, rating, tagging, bookmarking
• Media integration; photo, video & audio uploads
• Syndication
Online publishing
Online publishers are news oriented sites that regularly post a significant number of articles. Online publishing often integrates many Web 2.0 features such as commenting, ratings and tagging to alow users to interact with their content. They also might integrate content created by an extended group of reporters or general site users. Online publishing places a premium on content centric features such as
• content workflows
• media management; e.g. photos, videos and audio
• syndication
• aggregation (integration of 3rd party content)
• advanced, faceted search
• semantic markup
Drupal is the proven best selection in the online publishing space. Many prestigious online publications are built on Drupal including:
Best Choice:
1.Drupal
Intranet
Intranets are designed to facilitate employee collaboration. At their core they are essentially private web enabled knowledgebases. An intranet requires much of the sophisticated content management and search of a publishing site. Most Intranets also incorporate many of the features of a social media site.
Best choice
1. Commercial horizontal portals
2. Integrated Alfresco, Drupal
3. Alfresco
4. Liferay
About LevelTen Interactive
LevelTen is a full service digital consultancy located in Dallas, Texas. The company focuses on building online leaders through agile Web 2.0 strategies. LevelTen endeavors to make the web more human through open tools, information and processes.
