Open Source

Last weekend, digital agency water&stone, released their 2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. I consider this report one of the few non-bias and detailed surveys that come across my desk each year. The report isn't perfect, but the report does help give a good snapshot on the state of who's who in the world of open source content management systems.

You are most definitely going to want to take a look at the details in the report. The findings in this year’s report were based on a survey of more than 2,500 CMS users and additional research into a wide variety of measures of market share and brand strength. I'm still combing through the survey and taking note of the interesting individual nuggets of information that can be found in the results of the survey.

Not surprisingly, the report confirms the ranking position of open source's three most dominate Web content management systems in the market. The press release itself summarizes the results this way:

PHP-based systems WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal continue to dominate the web content management space. But, while the Big Three remain unchanged from last year, the Report concludes that WordPress retains a clear lead in the face of decreasing competition from Joomla!.

The decreasing competition from Joomla! can be seen most noticeably in the decrease of installations reported by the survey respondents in 2011 compared to 2010. The survey does note that this dramatic drop is likely due to the Joomla! community aggressively promoting the survey last year. This year, the promotion efforts were not coordinated and less influential. I only point this out because this is an example of where the report isn't "perfect" via inconsistencies in the yearly survey sample introducing  a margin of error in the trend comparisons. 

New version of ImpressCMS improves speed, memory use and efficiency, while laying the groundwork for features communities need for their online applications. 

The ImpressCMS team is very proud to announce the release of ImpressCMS 1.3 - smaller, faster and better! ImpressCMS enables communities to easily build websites around many different areas of interest and functions. 

The goals defined for the newest version of ImpressCMS were clear: completely overhaul the core to improve speed, improve efficiency and improve the architecture, while still maintaining the functionality of existing sites, modules and themes.

Dana Blakenhorn is one of the keynote speakers here at Liferay West Coast Symposium. He's probably one of the most non-Liferay speakers at this symposium giving him the perfect opportunity to express new ideas to this community of Liferay developers, partners, and users. I love these "strength of weak-ties" guests in conferences as it allows for some people in this crowd to "get it" and run with it.

The description for his talk:

Yesterday, Packt Publishing announced the finalists for their 2011 Open Source Award. This announcement signals the start of the next stage where the finalists are now open to public vote, which lasts until October 31.

Not all the categories in the award are content management related, but if you have an interest in open source I think you'll find each one of the finalists have a great story to tell. The finalists, listed in alphabetical order across all the categories, are as follows:

Open Source CMS Award

Using Facebook and Twitter, Steve Burge has compiled a list of social media responses to the question, "Why does Joomla rock?". It's an interesting list of 40 tweets and FB status messages and he's conveniently categorized the responses into short answers to the question.

Why does Joomla Rock?

This month, Packt Publishing began accepting nominations for its 2011 Open Source Awards. Breaking tradition, I've declined the invitation this year to be a member of the judging panel of this award (I've been a judge for the past four years). Regardless of my lack of participation as a judge, I still think this a great award and merits mention here on my blog.

This week, Joomla! 1.7 was officially released to the public. New features in this new version of the popular open source content management system include:

Alkacon Software has moved its software repository from CVS to Github. Github is based on the popular distributed revision control system (DRCS) Git. The web-based hosting service Github is very popular amongst Open Source Developers.

Alkacon Software has chosen Git as revision control to keep its software development process based on the best available technology (since CVS is technically out-dated) and to achieve a better collaboration with the OpenCms community.

The source code of OpenCms is now available from Github at https://github.com/alkacon/opencms-core.

Boston – June 16, 2011. Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform company, today announced the availability of a new version of its Case Management Framework. Nuxeo CMF is an enhanced distribution of Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (EP), adding functionality to support the flow and use of diverse but related content that needs to be handled and managed in a case or container metaphor.