On occasion there comes a time when one has to face the music and realize that what used to be a stellar product simply is no longer that. Case in point is the Mambo open source content management system (CMS), which I use for this site. At one point it was one of the best open source CMS systems out there, but presently it has very much become dormant as developers have largely abandoned it in favor of other projects. As such, it is time to move one, and so while browsing around and gathering information on the current crop of open source CMS products, I ran across this free report by CMS Wire, which examines the market share of the top 20 open source CMS systems. As expected, WordPress, Joomla (fork of Mambo), and Drupal are dominating the CMS landscape. Nevertheless, the report is pretty interesting examining the rate of adoption as well as the brand strength. The former consisting of download rates, evaluation/trial usage, and third party support, and the later consisting of page ranks, mindshare reports, and reputation indicators. While the individual ranking and ratings are interesting in themselves, I really had two major takeaways. First, there are several CMS products I’ve never even head off, even though I’ve been meddling in the web development space since the late 90s. Second, the most likely reason for why I didn’t know about these system is that in the CMS world there are the big three PHP based products mentioned above, and then there is everyone else. I did not realize that the gap between PHP and systems based on other languages/platforms was that significant!
On a different note, I personally find that open source projects particularly for the web tend to suffer from several major things: a) excessive forking and user base fragmentation, b) lack of a good automatic security updates mechanisms – there are simply too many web-sites that have been developed with systems that have been diagnosed with serious security issues, but never updated, c) a lack of reliable import mechanisms that would allow one to move from one system to another in a flash. Sometimes it is even painful to upgrade from one version of the same product to another! But all these are topics for another discussion.
Anyhow, none of the above really makes the decision in which direction to take this site any easier, but hopefully it was an interesting read. I’m a big fan of Joomla, not so much for the project’s technical accomplishments, but rather for their logical accomplishments. For example, of the three major CMS systems, Joomla’s directory of extensions is far and away the easiest to navigate – Hence one finds what one needs significantly faster. I’m not really a big WordPress fan. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve evaluated it plenty of times for several projects and even used it for quick proto-types, but in the end I just find it a bit too rigid. Making it do what I want and need it to do is more difficult than it should be at times – or maybe I’m just inept? I’ve not worked with Drupal, but I know several developers that swear by it. I’m tempted to move bajkowski.com onto the Drupal platform simply to get my feet wet. However, I’ve heard that is so infinitely customizable that one can spend an eternity playing around with the details and never actually deliver a final product – knowing myself that is a trap I could easily fall into. Then there is Joomla which I use for most projects. I definitely would like to have my own site running it as well just so that I have a live system on which I can test things before deploying them somewhere else – ahh, decisions decisions!
On a different note, I personally find that open source projects particularly for the web tend to suffer from several major things: a) excessive forking and user base fragmentation, b) lack of a good automatic security updates mechanisms – there are simply too many web-sites that have been developed with systems that have been diagnosed with serious security issues, but never updated, c) a lack of reliable import mechanisms that would allow one to move from one system to another in a flash. Sometimes it is even painful to upgrade from one version of the same product to another! But all these are topics for another discussion.
Anyhow, none of the above really makes the decision in which direction to take this site any easier, but hopefully it was an interesting read. I’m a big fan of Joomla, not so much for the project’s technical accomplishments, but rather for their logical accomplishments. For example, of the three major CMS systems, Joomla’s directory of extensions is far and away the easiest to navigate – Hence one finds what one needs significantly faster. I’m not really a big WordPress fan. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve evaluated it plenty of times for several projects and even used it for quick proto-types, but in the end I just find it a bit too rigid. Making it do what I want and need it to do is more difficult than it should be at times – or maybe I’m just inept? I’ve not worked with Drupal, but I know several developers that swear by it. I’m tempted to move bajkowski.com onto the Drupal platform simply to get my feet wet. However, I’ve heard that is so infinitely customizable that one can spend an eternity playing around with the details and never actually deliver a final product – knowing myself that is a trap I could easily fall into. Then there is Joomla which I use for most projects. I definitely would like to have my own site running it as well just so that I have a live system on which I can test things before deploying them somewhere else – ahh, decisions decisions!
