Comments on: OSS CMS Beauty Contest

By: Non-Profit Tech Blog » Hail to the Chairman, Joel Burton responds… and so do I

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 19:22:15 +0000

[...] 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) [...]

By: rickvug

rickvug — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 10:42:34 +0000

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.

By: abenamer

abenamer — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 18:03:09 +0000

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.

By: geilhufe

geilhufe — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 15:09:44 +0000

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