Report about the usage of content management systems (CMS) in 2010

Dec 10, 2010 14:59 GMT  ·  By

The water & stone Agency has released a report about the usage of content management systems (CMS) in 2010. While the top 3 was the same as last year, this year WordPress seriously out-performed Drupal and Joomla.

Compiled after a thorough market survey answered by 5000 individuals, with around 2800 answering each question, the report ranks content management systems by brand strength and market share.

The study was includes statistics about 20 CMSs as they follow: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, Concrete5, Liferay, CMS Made Simple, TYPO3, DotNetNuke, XOOPS, Umbraco, SilverStripe, Textpattern, e107, eZ Publish, OpenCMS, MODx, Alfresco, Movable Type and Plone.

The initial survey list consisted of 30 CMSs, but the received answers forced the agency to cut down the list to only 20 more relevant systems.

Since the 2009 report, Jahia and phpWebSite exited the study, being replaced by Movable Type and Concrete5, two of the most talked about projects this later year.

The results, compiled with third-party data like traffic ranking statistics and search engine query volume predict a risk of falling of the 2011 top 20 list for XOOPS and Textpattern.

This trend was also noticed here with us at Softpedia, the Webscripts team seeing a decrease of activity in those two projects during this year, compared to 2008 or 2009.

Measuring the rate of adoption, the study highlighted a huge community interest for WordPress. The former blogging engine, now a fully-fledged CMS stands at the top with 983,625 downloads per week.

This represents a 126.8% year-to-year growth. The interesting fact is that all other CMSs put together, barely totaled weekly downloads of over 200,000.

The biggest yearly growth was recorded by the Tiki Wiki CMS with a 570.2% raise since 2009.

While most survey responders still run mainly Joomla CMSs, third-party statistics services like Alexa, W3Techs and BuiltWith.com, which have a wider pooling base put WordPress way in front of the other systems by huge margins.

This number can be explained that most survey responders were web experts or webmasters, most of them active and well educated. Many may still have a running Joomla CMS on one of their servers, maybe since the days when WordPress was only used for blogging, and not for deploying stand-alone websites.

WordPress also came first as the CMS with the most “about” books printed this year. A normal statistics since WordPress is currently the hottest thing in web development. This can be confirmed by all the theme authors selling on ThemeForest.

Impact on freelancing was also measured, the report integrating data from Guru and Elance, two of the biggest places for programming geeks to search development jobs. Again WordPress won, but Joomla-related jobs were as sought after as WP, with Drupal coming third, but not that far behind.

On both services, WordPress was the second fastest growing CMS-related job trend, right behind Concrete5.

Measuring brand strength, search engine visibility, reputation, mindshare and project site popularity played in as major factors in the final standings.

For project site popularity WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, MODx and DotNetNuke compiled the top5. This ranking was calculated using Alexa's yearly ranking figures.

For search engine visibility, water & stone examined search engine rankings, as well as Google PageRank values for each of the CMS's project page and keywords. Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and Plone were the only projects with a PageRank of 9.

Judging Mindshare, a term for describing which systems are in the forefront of the public's mind, brand familiarity, share of voice, shared content, social bookmarking and search engine query volume were valued in.

The only CMS with over 50% of its users being very familiar with its commands and interface was Joomla. WordPress and Drupal (in this order) being the only other CMSs with a value over 25%.

This can be easily explained due to the projects' life span and previous success.

Regarding social bookmarking on sites like Digg, Reddit and Delicious, or blogosphere and social media impact, Joomla, Drupal and WordPress shared first places and exchanged places symmetrically in the top 3 in each category. We won't go in details here, the awesome charts in the report say it all.

Despite WordPress' constant presence in first place or inside the top 3 in almost any category, when users were asked to pick a preferred product, Joomla won by a landslide, WordPress not even being close.

The final top 5 was Joomla 1105 votes, DotNetNuke 346 votes, Drupal 318 votes, WordPress 278 votes and Liferay 118 votes.

For more on this topic, along with statistics, graphs and charts, refer to the complete report offered as a book. This can be found on the agency's site, the study being released as open source under Creative Commons. You can find it and download it following this link.

Download WordPress from the Softpedia Webscripts index here.

Download Joomla from the Softpedia Webscripts index here.

Download Drupal from the Softpedia Webscripts index here.

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