CMS Made Simple Forums

The folks over at water&stone did a great job investigating 16 Open Source CMS. Their report is an attempt to rank the market shares by looking at "rate of adoption" and "brand strength". The PDF-report can be downloaded here:

http://www.waterandstone.com/resources.html

CMS made simple is one of the systems and what striked me was the fact that users seem to rate CMSMS fairly well while all other parameters really suck. Sorry to say but I guess we need some marketing here or what do you think?

Regards
Nils

CMSMS is penalised because there are only a small number of developers advertising their services on a couple of freelancer websites and because there are no books about it in print.

The author implies these are negatives.

An alternative interpretation is that the popular CMSs like Drupal and Joomla are just too difficult to pick up and use easily and often require paid-for assistance and how-to books to get sites up and running. And even when a site is up and running it's often quite easy to tell it's a Joomla or a Drupal site - unless you are an expert designer or pay (what, more expense?) for a decent template.

Perhaps CMSMS should get bonus marks for *not* needing an army of paid-for consultants and an un-healthy investment in printed manuals.

Just my 2p [1] worth.

Nick

[1] 2 cents, if you prefer.

touche... very nice response.

hmmm... the authors of the document are developers that use the products that they 'rank' higher... not much different than if you asked a ford dealer to rank automobiles.  i wouldn't consider their 'report' to be anything more than marketing material propaganda aimed at their own (or prospective) clients.

and just to comment on one tidbit (from page 22):

Joomla! dominance of this metric is a strong indicator of mindshare.
People are searching more for "joomla" than for any of the other
systems -- and have done so consistently for the past 12 months.

this section dealt with prevalence in searches... what terms are searched for more (and on only one particular search engine, in this case, google)...

my own opinion here is that many searches for joomla are the direct result of the SUCKINESS of the system more than its popularity... it sucks, therefore people search (for answers) more... and not only that, it consistently sucks!

it could also be simply because joomla users generally have the IQ of an aol moron, and like those idiots, they use the google search box to go somewhere instead of typing a domain or URL in the browser location bar... and thus, joomla gets more 'searches'...

joomla does have a much larger community, but it is fragmented.. with cmsms, just about everything is all right here, so there isn't nearly as much need to go ask the google gods where to find something.

While I don't think it's 100% convincing (it admits to a regional bias, for example, and misses the fact that CMSMS' download numbers are clearly available on the dev site - 10,000 - 30,000 is not to be sneezed at!), I think dismissing the conclusions out of hand is not very smart. If people are not talking about CMSMS, we should be asking why.

I don't want to sound too critical of CMSMS, because it's hands-down my favourite for producing small-medium websites, but IMHO it needs quite a lot more to raise it to the level where it can compete with Joomla (which I think is the nearest in terms of what it offers; Drupal and (especially) Wordpress are more built for blogging and social media). Some of the drawbacks which stand out to me are:

* Very rigid implementation of pages and news; only one category can be chosen for each, difficult to automatically produce archives by date or category, no flexibility in adding new fields to pages.

* Not enough 'killer' modules, many still in 0.x versions (which give the appearance of an immature product)

* Little or no recognition of modern web trends; tagging, use of third-party APIs and services

I'm sure there are others, and I'm equally sure that some of these concerns will be addressed in 2.0. But remember the poor reviews on OpenSourceCMS? Criticism should be addressed maturely and responsibility if the project is to grow.

nils73 wrote: ...the fact that users seem to rate CMSMS fairly well...

I like this kind of metrics. User satisfaction is what matters.

stopsatgreen wrote: * Not enough 'killer' modules

What is this "killer module" feature CMSms is missing now ?

stopsatgreen wrote: * Little or no recognition of modern web trends

I'm not a modernist. What is modern may not match what is good. CMSms has pretty good W3C support.

Can't wait for 2.0

Pierre M.

I would like to pick up the previous posts and remind everybody of the famous words spoken by John F. Kennedy on January 20th 1961:

And so, my fellow CMSMS-lovers: ask not what your CMS can do for you - ask what you can do for your CMS.

Okay, slightly modified to fit this discussion but I guess everybody knows what I mean to say: Everybody should do something. There are a lot of people who are really engaged in programming. Others did a great job in designing the new website and some redesigned the admin-interface. There are a lot of active people here and I would like to draw my hat and raise my glass to you all for the great job you did and still do. Keep up the good work!

However we need to do some more. I keep myself busy with writing german articles about CMSMS and in short there will be a chapter about CMSMS in a german book. Right now I am trying to write a german manual as a docbook which is somehow different from the online-manual. It will be more or less a simple but visual step-by-step guide for authors. I might include a chapter or two for admins but there will be nothing in there for coders/designers since this is our part of the job at the agency. However I am planning to release this one as an ebook when it is done.

There are a lot of things you can do for CMSMS: Blog about it. Write about it. Use it. Praise it. The most important thing is: Do it.

Regards
Nils

Pierre M. wrote:What is this "killer module" feature CMSms is missing now ?

Look at what Drupal has for leading modules; CCK, which allows you to create new content types and add fields to existing ones; Views, which allows you to organise and display your data in a variety of different ways. I like using CMSMS because it's easy to set up and easy to organise your pages; but it's just too damned hard to do what should be something simple like create a news archive by date. Answers like "this is for serious developers only" is what will hold the project back in the end, IMHO, as it will be less attractive to module creators.

Pierre M. wrote:What is modern may not match what is good. CMSms has pretty good W3C support.

Yes, it does. But adherence to W3C standards shouldn't be a feature any more, it should be automatic. But we should be going beyond that by implementing microformats (like XFN & rel-tag at the very least), recognising that tagging is more flexible than categorising, providing a default tagging/categorising taxonomy in the core... lots of stuff. This shouldn't be taken as an attempt to copy Drupal, but as recognising that they do some stuff very well.

nils73 wrote:Ask not what your CMS can do for you - ask what you can do for your CMS.

Indeed. My PHP isn't up to scratch but I try to help out by answering questions on the forum and providing feedback on where I think this project succeeds and fails. I've offered to help by co-ordinating mark-up standards in modules (http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/topic,23998.msg116928.html), but no-one seems too keen on that idea. A shame.

Update: Just after posting this, I found this article: Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it (http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/fr ... -usability). Worth reading and wondering how much is applicable to CMSMS.

@nils : thx for the German documentation work.

@stopsatgreen : I'm not a coder but I think that some improvements you describe are not very "far away" for patch/modules coders. Bounties anyone ? And yes, 2.0 may nail some too

Pierre M.

Just some 0.02c from an occasional CMS MS developer, that is I build sites and depending on the client I occasionally use CMS MS (my choice) and occasionally use Joomla (client's choice).

CMS MS may not have so many or "killer" modules.  For my purposes at least it has the important ones.  My experience of Joomla! modules is that they are shoddy, as such I try to steer clear of them.

CMS MS is complex to program in, or more probably complex to get started programming in.  My favourite for ease of modifying and ease of getting to grips with is WordPress.  Its almost a joy to build templates for and with their fairly straight-forward filter and plugin api, it relatively straightforward to progress to more complex stuff.

I believe if a project is going to gain traction in a competitive open source environment, it needs to be easy to get to grips with and use (CMS MS certainly is), needs to be easy to get to grips with and extend/modify (CMS MS is not really, not the worst by a long shot, but not the best either) and needs to have comprehensive, easy to understand, documentation (CMS doesn't really have).  For me the last one is possibly the most important if you're to achieve real popularity.  The unfortunate thing is that great developers aren't always the best documentation writers.  So a less technically worthy product does better because early on their community acquired a good/hard working writer and a pretty website.