How’s yer CMS?

May 29th, 2008  |  Published in Nonprofit Tech, Web Tools  |  1 Comment

NTEN just released their CMS satisfaction survey. There is some great food for thought, although in some ways, the results aren’t so surprising. Most people (67%) want an easy to use interface. Most people (57%) also want ongoing support.

The single largest CMS used was Drupal, at 15%, followed by Plone and Joomla (approx 8% each.) Wordpress (which was not originally in the survey, they parsed this data out from the “other” category) was at 2%. Further, in looking more at the “other” category (which made up 29% of the CMS) there were quite a number of other FOSS CMS, including ImpressCMS, Zope, Movable Type, and Typo3.

All of the free and open source options did quite well in terms of Quality, Usability, and Value. The other questions, that are really more geared toward particular vendors, for FOSS CMS are not really applicable to the CMS itself, but to the consultants or vendors who implement it - which is bound to be variable.

Only two proprietary CMS systems, Antharia’s and Ektron, had scores as good as the open source CMS.The CMS options from the big three (er, now the big two) didn’t score as well.

Anyway, the survey report, and survey data are worth looking at if you are shopping for a CMS.

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  1. Ro says:

    May 30th, 2008 at 10:11 am (#)

    I wonder how well Wordpress would have scored if it weren’t in the ‘other’ category? Probably not that well, because I think we’re still about 6 months away from Wordpress being an out-of-the-box CMS — a bit too much tweakery is still required, especially with regards to category-smart dynamic inline content. Advanced, multiple, hierarchical navigations, multiple layouts, users/roles, everything else is already there, if not popularized. When the final pieces come together, Wordpress will be a fantastic CMS option because it’s just got such a simpler interface than its open source peers — maybe because it *hasn’t* been developed as a CMS, less assumptions have been made about what users need, resulting in less clutter.

    Ok sorry for evangelizing. The big thing this survey (re)establishes is that open source, whatever flavor you pick, has arrived and is the way to go when it comes to CMS. This puts so much value out of private hands and into the commons — which is fantastic! Next step — CRM. I think here will come a day when 5-10 great open source CRM alternatives, each of which integrates nicely with your CMS of choice, will become a reality.

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