Bryan Ruby

Last weekend, digital agency water&stone, released their 2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. I consider this report one of the few non-bias and detailed surveys that come across my desk each year. The report isn't perfect, but the report does help give a good snapshot on the state of who's who in the world of open source content management systems.

You are most definitely going to want to take a look at the details in the report. The findings in this year’s report were based on a survey of more than 2,500 CMS users and additional research into a wide variety of measures of market share and brand strength. I'm still combing through the survey and taking note of the interesting individual nuggets of information that can be found in the results of the survey.

Not surprisingly, the report confirms the ranking position of open source's three most dominate Web content management systems in the market. The press release itself summarizes the results this way:

PHP-based systems WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal continue to dominate the web content management space. But, while the Big Three remain unchanged from last year, the Report concludes that WordPress retains a clear lead in the face of decreasing competition from Joomla!.

The decreasing competition from Joomla! can be seen most noticeably in the decrease of installations reported by the survey respondents in 2011 compared to 2010. The survey does note that this dramatic drop is likely due to the Joomla! community aggressively promoting the survey last year. This year, the promotion efforts were not coordinated and less influential. I only point this out because this is an example of where the report isn't "perfect" via inconsistencies in the yearly survey sample introducing  a margin of error in the trend comparisons. 

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm currently playing catch-up in discussing all the good books sent my way this past year. Many of the books have been sent by the authors and publishers themselves for review and some of the books I've bought on my own dime. There should be no further evidence that I'm a procrastinator in posting book reviews than this particular review of Todd Tomlinson and John K. Vandyke's Pro Drupal 7 Development. This book was published almost a year ago, and I'm only now finding the time to blog about this book.

A couple weeks ago, Liferay's marketing and communication folks sent me an email mentioning that Liferay was included as a "Leader" in Gartner's 2011 Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals. After my usual procrastination I finally got around to reading the report and what follows in this blog post are some impressions that jumped at me while reading the report. I'm not convinced the randomness of these personal thoughts make up a blog post (at least a well-written blog post) but I'm going for it since my public note taking often turns out better than a well polished article.

One of my favorite yearly conferences is the CMS Expo in Evanston, Illinois. I'm not sure if I've ever been to a conference where so many open source CMS leaders in one room. Whether your CMS is open source or proprietary, you need to be at this conference. Whether you're a business leader, developer, content author, or analyst you'll be doing yourself a great favor by being at this year's CMS Expo.

At this moment, I have a tall stack of unread books related to content management systems sitting in front me. Publishers and authors apparently like my review style because new books continue to be sent my way. However, reading a book from cover to cover for a review (the last one being six months ago) takes time and I just haven't been able to keep up with the required reading. So with admission that I haven't read every page of these books, I've decided to at least start posting mini-reviews of select books and hoping that this move is still a win-win-win for publishers, authors and readers.

Over the years, I have gone on record stating the importance in allowing users the ability to leave comments at this site anonymously. I have always recognized that there is a segment of the online community that likes to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave an online trail that can be traced back to personal online accounts. Despite all the trouble I've had with the spammers and bots, the benefits of anonymous comments was always worth it to me in hopes of reading that one life changing comment provided by someone who preferred to stay in the shadows.

Dana Blakenhorn is one of the keynote speakers here at Liferay West Coast Symposium. He's probably one of the most non-Liferay speakers at this symposium giving him the perfect opportunity to express new ideas to this community of Liferay developers, partners, and users. I love these "strength of weak-ties" guests in conferences as it allows for some people in this crowd to "get it" and run with it.

The description for his talk:

Here at the Liferay West Coast Symposium, Bryan Cheung (CEO) and Paul Hinz (CMO) just announced the newest and upcoming version of the company’s Liferay Portal 6.1, as well as the developer community release of the new Liferay Marketplace. Liferay, Inc. hopes these moves represents a showing of strong new convergence of portal, web content management and modular applications for Liferay products.

As I mentioned last month, this week the 2011 Liferay West Coast Symposium takes place. I'm excited to attend this conference as when it comes to Liferay, I'm definitely a newbie and this is a great opportunity for CMS Report to focus and learn more about Liferay. During this conference, Liferay is scheduled to announce the details for Liferay Portal 6.1 as well as their new Marketplace.

Yesterday, Packt Publishing announced the finalists for their 2011 Open Source Award. This announcement signals the start of the next stage where the finalists are now open to public vote, which lasts until October 31.

Not all the categories in the award are content management related, but if you have an interest in open source I think you'll find each one of the finalists have a great story to tell. The finalists, listed in alphabetical order across all the categories, are as follows:

Open Source CMS Award