Ric Shreves is a web applications consultant and author. He's been building CMS websites since 1999 and is currently a partner at water&stone, a web design agency focused on open source content management systems. Ric has published two books on the Drupal CMS and one book on the Mambo CMS. His newest book, the Ubuntu Desktop Visual Blueprint, was released in April of 2009. He is currently working on two titles for Wiley & Co: The Joomla! Bible and The Drupal Bible.
I just finished up the Joomla! Bible for Wiley & Sons and am now working on the Drupal Bible. After that? What's next? I have several choices, so I thought I'd put it out there for everyone to have a voice. Let me know -- what are you interested in? What would you like to see a book about?
>>Submit your ideas and vote on the ones received to date.
Before we could begin the research for the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, we first had to define the list of systems we considered to be contenders for the crown. Last year's report featured nineteen systems. (This year we plan to do things a bit differently, though you'll have to wait for the report itself to find out what exactly!) We started our internal discussions with the list of nineteen systems from last year, to which we added the significant number of suggestions from readers of the report.
Without giving away too much too soon, I wanted to share our final list of the Top 20 Open Source Web Content Management Systems. We list them here for you in alphabetical order, along with links to the project sites.
Judging the market share of open source content management systems with numerical accuracy is a difficult proposition due to the lack of direct metrics on adoption rates. As a result, in creating the 2008 report, we focused on a number of indirect indicators and then cross-correlated them to reach our conclusions. One of the (many) indicators we examined was the popularity of the primary project site for each particular system.
It's time once again to take a look at the adoption rates and brand strength metrics for the most prominent open source content management systems. In July water&stone will be releasing the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. In the course of preparing that report, I will be posting various metrics and indicators that might be of interest (and stimulate some discussion).
If you remember the conclusions of the 2008 report, the top three systems were WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. One of the key issues we'll be looking at this year as how the race for market share, and mind share, has shaped up between those three strong brands. I was looking today at Forum activity as an indicator of buzz and mindshare. Here's a neat little dynamic chart from Omgili that shows the activity levels for the top three brands across the last 30 days.
With more than 4,000 Extensions in the Joomla! Extensions Directory, one of the most daunting aspects of selecting a Joomla! Extension is finding the right tool for the job. With thousands of Extensions to choose from, you are sometimes faced with multiple options that appear to achieve your goals. While there really is no subsitute for downloading things and trying them out yourself, in this article I provide a list of fifty Joomla! Extensions as a starting point for addressing common needs.
Fierce Content Management published today an interview I did a week or two ago with editor Ron Miller. The article is the latest in their series of one-on-one chats with industry insiders.
In the words of the publisher, the series provides "in-depth interviews and conversations with the leading ECM minds of our time." And while I am sure reasonable minds might differ as to whether I should be included in that defintion, it was certainly a pleasure to be asked!
The conversation touches on the present state of the open source CMS in relation to the enterprise, recommendations for SMBs, and some advice on what to watch out for when selecting systems.
