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.
Nevertheless, what makes this report significant is its effort to capture the market share of the top twenty open source CMS in the marketplace in a single report. “WordPress turned in another strong year, clearly outpacing both Joomla! and Drupal,” notes lead analyst Ric Shreves. “Looking beyond the Big Three we find a considerable amount of movement in the market, with several smaller systems turning in solid performances this year. Concrete5, in particular, had a very strong year.”
Though Concrete5 still lags the Big 3 in terms of total market share, no other system we looked at came close to showing the growth seen by Concrete5. The fact that the system also performed well in the 2010 Report leads us to the conclusion that Concrete5 is a contender, and bears close watch.
The survey also notes that there is interest beyond PHP in open source content management systems. I recently stated that I think too many people in the open source community dismiss DotNetNuke, SharePoint, and even mojoPortal because these CMSs are .Net based. I believe this report shows again the importance of looking at the complete open source CMS marketplace, including non-PHP CMSs.
Though PHP-based systems remain the populist choice, the survey places two .NET [DotNetNuke and Umbraco] and three Java systems [Alfresco, Liferay, OpenCMS] in the Top 20. DotNetNuke remained the market leader in the .NET space. In the Java WCM space, Liferay and Alfresco are fighting a closely matched battle.
Press Releases rarely are the bearer of bad news, so it may interest you that the press release fails to mention one of the reports principle conclusions:
Systems possibly at risk include: e107, Movable Type, Textpattern and Xoops.
I'm not surprised to see e107, Movable Type, and Textpattern diminish in the rankings of this survey as we've seen the same trend here at CMSReport.com. What is surprising to me though is to see XOOPS on that list as they have been aggressive the past couple years in both their marketing and their software development. Then again we've wavered in our own support of XOOPS over the years too.
One of the more interesting aspects of the survey is its attempt to determine exposure to the mention of the open source CMS via social media. In the "Share the Voice" section of the survey, try to discover which of our systems are receiving the greatest number of mentions across a variety of social media channels including: social bookmarking, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. In case you're wondering, Facebook is apparently more popular among Joomla! fans and Twitter appears popular for Drupal fans (though plenty of Joomla! fans are there too).
Beyond the scope if this report are the "white elephants" in the room. What will the effect of SaaS and PaaS have on open source CMS? See my story on Accrisoft as an example of how I think the CMS market is evolving. What is the effect social networks such as Google+ and Facebook for using a CMS as a blog? See the irony of CMS discussions taking place on Google+ and not on a hosted website. There are changes taking place in the CMS marketplace that I don't think are necessarily represented in this 2011 snapshots. I'm betting those market place changes will be more apparent in the next year or two and hopefully we'll see a glimmer of them in water&stone's 2012 report.