SMACKDOWN :: Who were the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) market leaders in 2008?
Jul 31, 2008 by Mircea Goia Content Management, MyTestBox News
When it comes to life online, we all use content management systems in one way or another: blogging, building websites, maintaining websites, marketing them, etc.
If we are not web experts, we usually just use software tools to develop websites. We may not even know what it is that powers the websites—what is actually doing the back-end work. Now it’s time to discover Content Management Systems (or CMS systems), and which ones are used most frequently.
I came across an interesting study about who are the leaders in open source content management systems market in the year of 2008.
The study was just released to the public and it was conducted by Ric Sheves from Water & Stone web development company (cool name, by the way). The company specializes in open source content management systems, particularly Drupal, Joomla!, Mambo, osCommerce and WordPress. Ric lives in Bali, Indonesia (talking about working from cool places).
At 50 pages, there is a significant amount of data in this study that should be of use to developers or to anyone who is looking to commit to a web publishing system. You don’t want to bet on a dead horse, do you?
But first let’s see WHAT is a content management system.
According to Wikipedia a content management system is:
- …a computer software used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fashion. CMSs are frequently used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators’ manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. The content managed may include computer files, image media, audio files, video files,electronic documents, and Web content.A web content management system is a CMS designed to simplify the publication of Web content to Web sites, in particular allowing content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files.
Because the theme of this site is web software (software which runs on a web server and in a browser – not desktop software) we will concentrate on web content management systems. And because we do like free things (who doesn’t?) we will present this study which took in consideration only the open source web content management systems (and only the publication-oriented CMSs, not e-commerce like osCommerce and not enterprise portals like LifeRay). Commercial or hosted products are excluded too.
Below are more details about this study.
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This whole exercise began by brainstorming through various methods of assessing popularity and adoption rates. While there are a number of indicators, there is no standardized metric to gauge market share in this particular segment — there is simply no way to get an accurate fix on how many systems are actually in use on the web right now.
For this survey the research results were broken down into two broad categories:
• Rate of Adoption
• Brand Strength
In each of the areas, they used a multi-faceted approach, assessing a wide variety of measures to identify broad trends and patterns from which we can draw conclusions with some
degree of confidence. Among the many metrics they sampled are a number of non-traditional indicators, such as Twitter Prominence and Social Bookmarking statistics.
Rate of Adoption
The team began their examination of the open source CMS market by attempting to measure the relative rates of adoption of the systems in the sample set. For reasons discussed below, direct evidence alone is not sufficient to allow them to draw firm conclusions.
As a result, they were forced to look at a variety of metrics in hopes of building a more complete picture of the current state of the market:
- Downloads
- Installations
- Third Party Support
- - Developers
- - Publishers
All these three metrics are explained in details in the study.
Sphere: Related Content
Tags: b2evolution, cms, content management, drupal, elgg, joomla, mambo, market share, mediawiki, modx, phpnuke, pligg, plone, study, survey, tikiwiki, typo3, wordpress
MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia) release candidate 1.13 is available now. Try it out!
Jul 26, 2008 by Mircea Goia MyTestBox News
MediaWiki just released the 1.13 version of their wiki software (this is a release candidate which means it’s not recommended to be used in a production environment, just for testing purposes). MediaWiki is a free open source wiki software (server based) which is licensed under GNU (General Public License). It comes from Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia.
Wikipedia, the online free encyclopedia and one of the most visited websites on the Internet, is powered by MediaWiki, This wiki software it is designed to run on a large server farm for a website which can get hundreds of thousands (and even millions) hits a day. It is a powerful piece of software, scalable and feature-rich wiki implementation. It is written in PHP scripting language and uses the MySQL database for storing the data.
MediaWiki writes to a database the pages edited by the users but without deleting the previous version thus allowing easy reverts in case of spamming or vandalism (and that surely can occur!).
It can handle multimedia files (audio, video) and images, which are store in the filesystem. And, to be scalable even more, it can uses caching and Squid proxy server software to handle tons of users.
Check out MediaWiki in action on Wikipedia! (Mediawiki’s website is at www.mediawiki.org)
The release comes with a wide range of improvements:
* Drop-down AJAX search suggestions ($wgEnableMWSuggest)
* New special pages: FileDuplicateSearch, ListGroupRights
* The search box in the MonoBook sidebar can be moved up by editing
[[MediaWiki:Sidebar]]
* More options on Special:Recentchangeslinked and Special:WhatLinksHere
* Double redirects created by a page move can be fixed automatically
* Friendlier behaviour for users who click a red link but can’t edit
* Image redirects are now enabled by default
* Special:UserRights and Special:SpecialPages have been redesigned
* Search results show image thumbnails
* Can hide categories with __HIDDENCAT__
* New parser functions: PAGESINCATEGORY, PAGESIZE
Full release notes can be found here:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/tags/REL1_13_0RC1/phase3/RELEASE-NOTES
It seems Mediawiki changed their development model option now for a “continuos integration” model (with quarterly snapshots releases).
Their latest development code is always kept ready to run (and it’s integrated right away in Wikipedia).
The old release branches will still get security updates for a year or so, starting with the first release. But the less important bug fixes and feature developments will be made on the development trunk and show up in the next quarterly release.
Those wishing to use the latest code instead of a branch release can obtain it from source control: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download_from_SVN
Sphere: Related ContentTags: mediawiki, open-source, php, wiki software, wikipedia
TikiWiki – a powerful wiki / groupware system
Mar 20, 2008 by Melanie Bremner Wikis
TikiWiki (Tiki) CMS/Groupware is an open source web-based application that you can use to build a website for working collaboratively with others. The content management system at the heart of TikiWiki powers wikis, forums, blogs, map servers, and more. You can configure the various tools and customize the appearance of the website from Admin Pages that are also web-based.
There are some video-tutorials at the end of the review. Check them out!
Wikipedia definition of a Wiki:
A wiki is a software that allows users to easily edit and link pages together. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. Wikipedia is one of the best known wikis.
Wikis are used in many businesses to provide affordable and effective Intranets and for knowledge management. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work.”
WikiWiki is a re-duplication of “wiki“, a Hawaiian word for “fast“. Some suggest that wiki means “What I know Is”. However this is a backronym(a phrase that is constructed “after the fact” from a previously existing word).
TikiWiki CMS/Groupware www.tikiwiki.org was created by the Tiki Wiki Community, and is available for free under the LGPL General Public License. The last release was February 23rd, 2008. Tiki Wiki is a dynamic application and not a static.
You can customize some of the links and URLs that Tiki produces in order to create “search engine friendly” links. Tiki includes a “_htaccess” file that takes advantage of the web-servers re-write rules. If you would like to enable this feature, you simply rename the _htaccess file to .htaccess
Sphere: Related ContentTags: cms software, groupware, mediawiki, tiki, tikiwiki, wiki software
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