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. 

WordPress 3.1.3 was made available to the public yesterday. This release is not only a  security update for all previous versions but also offers some new features.

WordPress 3.1.3 contains the following security fixes and enhancements:

• Various security hardening.
• Taxonomy query hardening.
• Prevents sniffing out user names of non-authors by using canonical redirects.
• Media security fixes.
• Improved file upload security on hosts with dangerous security settings.
• Cleans up old WordPress import files if the import does not finish.
• Introduces “clickjacking” protection in modern browsers on admin and login pages.

For details, feel free to check out the change log. Download WordPress 3.1.3 or update automatically from the Dashboard → Updates menu in your site’s admin area.

Also, you may be curious enough and want to take a look at the original release announcement that not only talks about WordPress 3.1.3 but also talks about the availability of WordPress 3.2 Beta 2. We'll talk more about WordPress 3.2 later.

Everett Griffiths recently wrote a comparison between WordPress and MODx over at TipsFor.US. In the article he walks the reader through various CMS comparison factors such as installation, templating, menus, plugins, architecture, custom content, security, and support. This comparison specifically focuses on WordPress 3.1 and MODx Revolution.

Everett writes:

There are a lot of Content Management Systems (CMS’s) out there, so I wanted to give a blow-by-blow analysis comparing two of them: MODx and WordPress. I feel oddly qualified to do so: Brian and I just authored a book on WordPress plugin plugin development (WordPress 3 Plugin Development), and I am a MODx Solution Partner who was invited to speak at the MODxpo conference in Dallas last year. I’ve used both flavors of MODx (Evolution and Revolution) and WordPress while building somewhere around 50 web sites over the past couple years, and I like both systems. I have even contributed a couple plugins for both systems (e.g. Custom Content Type Manager for WordPress). So after the urging of some friends and colleagues (like Kris), I’m organizing my techno-ramblings into a coherent article.

This articles is a fair comparison between WordPress and MODx.  If you're interested in reading the details of the article you should read the original article, WordPress vs. MODx, at the TipsFor.US site.

Mark Jaquith, a lead developer for Wordpress, recently posted on a WordPress developer's blog the plans for WordPress 3.2.  Below are some of the changes and features Jaquith says will be on this new version of WordPress that caught my eye. My personal comments gave been added to the side.

• Faster release cycle than 3.1 - Project development the past few years must have been like molasses the past few years, because projects like WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, and Mozilla Firefox are all promising quicker release cycles this year. They did appear to have their IE6 > IE7 "Sputnik" moment in 2010, didn't they?
• Faster and Lighter - Old code and outdated technologies are being dropped from WordPress. This move isn't just to improve performance but also also to improve the writing experience. You can expect some user experience changes here too with emphasis on "distraction free writing".
• List Tables API improvements - Finalize the API for third party use and more flexibility.
• PHP 5.2 (5.2.4, specifically) to be required - Unbelievable, I hadn't realized that WordPress hadn't dropped PHP 4 before this release. A number of open source projects already made the commitment from PHP 4 to PHP 5 a couple years ago. Oddly WordPress is "dropping the the old, not adding the new". Why wouldn't you embrace PHP 5 all the way?
• MySQL 5 to be required.- Relax on this one. I have yet to see a MySQL 5 upgrade requirement gone bad.
• Upgrade improvements - Changed-files-only upgrades can be done with zero changes to core.

[Found via Weblog Tools Collection]