Who is the fairest of them all? Which CMS has the most talent, looks best in a swimsuit and can answer questions about world peace eloquently? Well, according to this Alexaholic chart of site traffic for the main sites for each OSS CMS, it looks like the Joomla/Mambo combination is faring quite well. Drupal comes in a close second, a rising star in the OSS CMS world. Plone and Zope seem to be plodding along but it looks like the technology is no longer experiencing positive growth in the number of visits to their site. This bodes badly for the future of Plone and Zope. I’m definitely not surprised by the information below as you can certainly sense this when you visit the Plone and Zope sites. They’re infrequently updated and the documentation for the both OSS techs tends to break very quickly.
What’s the upshot for me? I think I’m going to take a harder look at Drupal, just on it’s own merits and because Drupal intrigues me with its CiviCRM package.
alexa website statistics by alexaholic
Confessions
I fully expected Joomla and Mambo to do well in this battle but I didn’t know Drupal was so hot! This is the kind of information I hope to provide for non-profit IT directors out there. It’s not only important to know what technology is currently popular but also to know what is moving up quickly. It’s not so you can adopt the quickly moving technologies right off the bat but to understand that every year the Internet seems to coalesce around some new technology for whatever reason. Just so you know, I wouldn’t just throw away Plone and Zope just yet, it still has a fairly substantial developer population.
Alexaholic is wicked isn’t it?.
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Two notes:
(1) CiviCRM is CMS-agnostic. It works within Drupal, Joomla and Mambo. It can work within Plone, but no one has done the work yet.
(2) Alexa traffic is a little misleading in that Zope/Plone may be very healthy commuinties primarily composed of vendors… and hence the lower traffic rating. Sometimes a strong core open source community is better than a huge sprawling one. I just caution folks evaluating open source communities to avoid purely quantitative measures (or even just a single measure)… it might not give you the full story.
david geilhufe
http://www.civicrm.org
Hi David,
I think CiviCRM hasn’t been implemented in Plone probably as a result of the lower numbers of participants in the Plone community. I’d bet anyone $10 that there’s a somewhat strong correlation between the number of developers for a particular CMS and the number of implementations of any third-party OSS application like CiviCRM for that CMS.
Alexa will NOT give the full story. I’m actually writing a Nonprofit Technology Real-Time Popularity Engine that will incorporate both machine-oriented results as well as human-generated results from multiple sources. I’ll definitely be including CiviCRM (aka http://www.openngo.org) in the mix too. However, I think Alexa gives IT directors a clue as to what’s important out there. As Mao once said, “Every quality manifests itself in a certain quantity, and without quantity, there can be no quality.” Certainly, the strength of a developer community can be measured in raw numerical terms. There’s just simply more bandwidth that community has to accomodate more implementations. And in this particular case, the huge size of the Joomla and Mambo community really says something about the ability of that community to handle more things at once.
I would take another look at Drupal. If you are looking for maximum flexibility and a clean core this is where it is at. With the beta views, category, content creation kit, actions and workflows modules, Drupal’s technical edge will grow.
There is an effort going on now to make the CMS look better, which is very doable, as the theming system is infinitely flexible. I have drunk the coolaid: exterior polish is a lot easier to do than doing the CMS right. Drupal is the horse to bet on for the long run.
This is obviously my opinion of course.
[...] Those of you on the NOSI e-mail list are probably aware of the comments I’ve made concerning OSS CMSes. I made the following comment a couple days ago on the list talking about the OSS CMS Beauty Contest. I’m taking the time to answer here so that I don’t hog the list with my responses which tend to be fairly long. I’m really enjoying the back-and-forth despite the two flames I’ve received because I’m really learning more about how OSS consultants think than the merits of the case they’re arguing (and most of the time, very poorly I might add — note to developers: you do yourselves a disservice by flaming people who may well be your prospective client one day) [...]