Select an open source content management system
How to select an open source content management system (CMS)
I'm getting ready to teach a course on Web CMS this Winterim here at UW - Stevens Point, and I've been toying around with the notion of how we make software selections. Here are two visual representations that I think help paint the landscape for CMS. The first, Figure 1, is derivative work from an extensive 90 page report that evaluates top open source CMS in terms of adoption, prevalence on search engines, social networking about them, etc. The basic notion is to get a general sense of who leads the pack. Figure 1 takes all of that research and synthesizes it using an algorithm that I developed to help prioritize the work of water & stone.
My basic notion was this: actual utilization of a CMS probably counts more toward establishing a presence for that CMS than does brand awareness. Likewise, social networking, blogging and other categories appeared to have a fair amount of overlap. Many of those were aggreggated, or it appeared they were skewing the results.
Figure 1: Derivative work from: "2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, water&stone and CMSWire (2009)." (PDF)
I think it's fairly evident that there are roughly three tiers:
Tier 1: Joomla!, Drupal and Word Press
Tier 2: Plone, DotNetNuke, Alfresco, Typo3, eZPlublish, Lifreay, MODx, CMS Made Simple, Silver Stripe, Xoops, OpenCMS
Tier 3: TikiWiki, Umbraco, Text Pattern, e107, phpWebSite, Jahia
My first pass at selection, therefore, would likely lead to me to consider Tier 1 candidates. Failing to find what I need there, I may then work into Tiers 2 and 3.
In order to accomplish this, I conducted a more general kind of needs assessment where I noted the features of the CMS itself, the support community, and the code base that would factor into this kind of decison. The result: Figure 2. A version of this figure that also includes: Plone, Xoops, Dotnetnuke, Typo3 and ezPublish can also be downloaded here (PDF).
Figure 2: CMS Selection Matrix
I still have to determine which CMS best fits my particular circumstances. For example, although Word Press appears to be a distant third choice, it does score well in terms of how usable and easy-to-learn it is. If my goal is to provide basic blogging functionality with a few bells and whistles, Word Press may be an excellent choice.