Commenting on several popular CMS

Editor's Note: There have been moments here at CMS Report when I am amazed with the insightful and in depth comments written by some of our readers. This is one of those moments. Chris Jewitt, left us a comment regarding several popular content management systems (CMS). The CMS mentioned in this brief review are Joomla!, Wordpress, Dotnetnuke, Plone, Drupal, Alfresco, and Sharepoint.

I moved Chris Jewitt's comments have been moved to the "front page" so the story isn't missed by those visiting this site. Any hyperlinks found in this story have been added by the editor.

Kudos to Mike Heck for a high level comparison of the top 5 open source content management systems. Personally I find it difficult to scrutinize any community (geeky or not) that has contributed for the # of years and volume these communities have. As Amy so eloquently mentioned, if you don't like something then contribute - make a difference.

I have to also say, I have often found myself left empty when trying to find a good objective, deep-dive opinions and analysis of these web content management systems. I think the only true "content management system" is Alfresco in this comparison. It seems the strength of the others are web content management.

I've spent the last 6 years working in commercial content management and portal systems. Lately I've been investigating open source solutions and started down the Drupal path; however, I still waffle over Plone. For what it's worth, here's my reasoning or two cents:

Joomla - I was turned off by the menu system. Also concerned about the divorce from Mambo. Felt I should stay away while they evolve the system. They have a lot of momentum though.

Wordpress - deserves mention. For low-level, small sites or blog-centric sites WordPress has a huge user base and real simple to use and install. Also great for the non techie user. I didn't have the opinion it has the necessary content or feature granularity that the other CMS's have, but I'm in no way a WP expert.

DotNetNuke - My hosting is not .NET based, so I didn't give this serious consideration.

Plone - This looked very promising. A lot of large companies using this platform.. still a little new, so I wasn't ready to jump on board. Yet!

Drupal - I decided to go with Drupal because of its user base, a lot of buzz from my peers and I like the focus around social sites. There were others, but I'm rambling... I've been disappointed by the documentation, there seems to be a lot but it's not clearly structured. Also, they're working on version 7, but it seems that version 6 still has some key modules still in alpha or beta stage. I don't understand the rationale around 7. Lack of a rich-text editor with core seems silly to me...

Alfresco - Impressed by their executive background, features and functionality. One thing that's important to keep in mind, skill set required to maintain or extend Alfresco. Unless you have a strong java background or staff with java skills, you'll be stuck finding and paying for expensive resources to fill that gap. Not a good fit for me, so move on. At some point I see this going commercial...

If you're still reading... I'm sorry! I got a bit winded

Commercial:

Commercial systems are not without their problems. None of these are cheap by any means. PRICE is a huge driving interest in open source solutions. For example, you could easily pay >$100 per person for these solutions - just for seats. Doesn't include server and database licensing.

SharePoint - Great product but just because Microsoft developed it, doesn't make it easy to use.

Obviously not all inclusive, but...
If you're looking for the buzz around these: Google Insights

Avg. Monthly Search Volume in Google: