The folks over at water & stone have delivered a really interesting report on the state of open-source Web content management. They looked at 16 systems, then attempted to rank their market share.
How you actually do this is tricky. So they looked at two parameters:
To do this, they checked all sorts of measurements including books in print about the system, Alexa rankings, Google Trends data, recorded downloads, people offering development services on various freelancing sites, Twitter mentions, awards received, etc. The number of different ways they devised to try and determine the buzz about a system is impressive.
In the end, the results were semi-surprising. What wasn’t surprising is that they determined that three three systems —
— are leading everyone else, far and away. What was a little surprising is that Joomla seems to be out-pacing Drupal these days. Last year, I named what I thought were the top 5 systems, and put Drupal ahead of Joomla. But a lot has happened in the last year.
Also interesting was the descent of Mambo. Joomla represents a really effective example of a community fork. There was some dissent in the Mambo community in 2005, so a bunch of people forked the code and created Joomla. They’ve never looked back, and Mambo may never recover. This report suggests that it’s on an inexorable slide.
Sadly, my beloved eZ publish did not fare very well either, which is not surprising. While being very strong in Europe, eZ has struggled to get a foothold in the U.S. due to a host of issues, and it’s not making a great deal of headway in brand awareness it seems.
You can read the entire report here (60+ page PDF, though a lot of pages are filled with charts).
I don´t think that Alexa ranking should be used as scientific factor. It´s not more than a indicator in my opinion and very hard to verify what it means in terms of project size and project complexity. I think here Drupal [you might guessed that we prefer Drupal] is far ahead of WP for example.
If you have just look at Harvard Science and FastCompany as two larger Drupal projects i think they are more than equivalent to plenty of much simpler WP blogs run by individuals. I´m not saying WP has not its area where it might fits best - but above a certain threshold its probably a much better idea to go for Drupal or Joomla.
