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.
It's official, the ink has dried on the contract and the table of contents has been approved: My next book project is the Drupal Bible!
This will be my fourth title for U.S. publisher Wiley & Sons and my second book in the popular Bible series. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Bible series of tech books, Wiley pushes authors to provide "the ultimate resource" on the topic at hand. The books strive to be comprehensive and authoritative.
The Drupal Bible, like the Joomla! Bible I am currently working on, will cover how to obtain and install the core, how to configure the system optimally, and how to manage the various core features. Looking beyond the core, I dive into customization, common extensions, and the basics of ongoing site management.
The Bible series includes explanations, tips and practical examples. Weighing in at well over 700 pages, it is expected that this book will provide a much-needed resource for site administrators and those who are looking to deploy sites using the Drupal CMS.
Current plans are for a publication date in late Q4, with the hope being that we can focus on the upcoming Drupal 7 release.
My fave tech industry insider, The Reg, today reports on an IDC study that indicates the recession is speeding adoption of Linux. The conclusion mirrors what we've been seeing at water&stone as well, that is, while the downturn has lead to a few people deferring projects, many have not, choosing instead to consider lower cost alternatives.
As the study put it: "IDC has found that economic downturns lead to a reduction in spending, but not necessarily an equal-sized reduction in deployments. In fact, past recessions have helped to accelerate platform shifts that were in progress."
Note, this isn't a fluffy little single digit shift in trends -- a full 72% of the firms evaluated indicated that they "are either actively evaluating or have already decided to increase their adoption of Linux on the server in 2009." Perhaps more surprising: 68% made the same claim for the desktop!
While the IDC report is focused solely on Linux adoption patterns, I would assert that the conclusions are also relevant in other open source situations, for example in the open source CMS space. The same factors that accelerate Linux adoption are also speeding the shift to open source content management systems.
We've seen several enquiries of late that say, basically, "our budget's been cut so we'd like to explore open source alternatives for completing this project." From our conversations with other vendors, it appears that they are hearing the same sort of feedback from the market.
None of this should come as a surprise. Smart firms are always exploring options to stretch their budgets and achieve better ROI. This shift to open source is overdue. Solutions like Drupal, eZ Publish, Plone, Alfresco and Magento deliver advanced functionality at very reasonable costs. It just makes good business sense from where I stand.
I received a request the other day from someone interested in finding social networking-type resources focused on open source content management systems. A good question, and one that I thought might make a useful list of resources.
I did a bit of looking around at the larger networks and found the following. Please feel free to add your own faves using the comments function at the bottom of the article.
(Note: Updated 18 March 2009 with a list of Official Project Twitter sites.)
