The 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report was released today and concludes that three brands - Joomla!, WordPress and Drupal - dominate today’s market. Since 2008, The Big Three have solidified their grip on the market, with Joomla! taking the lead in many indicators for the first time since the project’s launch in 2005.
As you may know, I am currently writing the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report for water&stone. The same report was published last year and widely read (The 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share Report is still available on the water&stone website if you'd like to see. It is free for download.).
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.
