CMS Wire and Water & Stone released their 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report late last week, and we can’t say we’re surprised by the results.
The report incorporated a variety of criteria, including adoption, mindshare, and third party support to reach their overall conclusion: WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are dominating the open source market. The 70+ page report, which discusses a variety of open source CMS topics, compared 20 top market leaders.
Joomla came away the leader in overall market share by a little over 6% (although WordPress dominated by a large margin in sites identifying as “blogs”) – a result that doesn’t surprise us; more on that below the fold. But digging into some of the key metrics we use to measure project success as a service firm – like user satisfaction – suggests a different conclusion: WordPress is leading the pack, and Drupal is just behind.
Source: 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, water&stone and CMSWire (2009)
Continue reading WordPress, Drupal top Open CMS Report… why we’re not surprised
On July 2nd, a post by Jake Goldman that was originally published here on the C. Murray Consulting Blog was enhanced and republished on Smashing Magazine. The post began as five quick tips for implementing WordPress as a Content Management System and grew into an in-depth, essential guide for leveraging WordPress as a full-featured website CMS.
Read the full post on Smashing Magazine
The post highlights real-life examples from some of our recent WordPress implementations:
Congratulations to Jake for creating such valuable tips and making them available to the open source community. Thanks also to Smashing Magazine for distributing the article.
Ever since WordPress 2.5 was released, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of WordPress as a comprehensive CMS.
WordPress offers a wealth of plug-ins that extend the limitations of its reasonably light core; we’ve even contribued a couple of our own back to the community. But if you like to make slim, fast websites – like we do – you know that sometimes the plug-ins, and their overhead, are overkill.
Here are five power tips for template developers that address common CMS implementation challenges with solutions that are not well documented or not entirely intuitive. Please note that all of the code here was written for and tested with the latest version of WordPress (2.7.1). Some of the functions may not be compatible with older versions, or may require some initialization (i.e. global $post).
Continue reading WordPress as a CMS: 5 8 Power Tips for Template Developers
The Council of Public Relations Firms launched the first version of RFP Builder; a web application that guides prospective PR firm clients through the process of selecting the right firm. Our new case study has the details.
Acelero Learning released the new version of their public website. Built on CitySoft Community Enterprise, the site includes a new Head Start Resource Center with self registration, a custom news channel with improved formatting, and a custom jQuery-powered slideshow on the home page that offers all the elegance of Flash without the overhead or maintenance costs.
YAMI-U and the resulting campaign, No LOL in HIV, was featured in an article in the New York Times. We led the web component of this campaign, working closely with the youth advocates and the creative directors, The Watsons.
Continue reading Assorted client news: RFP Builder, Acelero, YAMI in NYT, and more
I’ve been working with website content management systems for 9 years or so – since the last time our economy took a bit of a nose-dive. Around that time there was a flood of discussion about the ROI of implementing a Content Management System (CMS), mostly written by vendors trying to sell very expensive software in a down market. We’re in a similar economic situation now, but over the past 9 years two big things have changed:
- The cost of CMS software has decreased exponentially since 2000
- Site visitor expectations have increased exponentially since 2000
Continue reading Content Management System (CMS) ROI – Not Just About Cutting Costs Anymore
After our previous post on mobile-optimized websites it seemed to us that we should lead by example. That’s why we’ve released version 1 of “C. Murray Consulting Mobile”.
For v1, we focused on the powerful and increasingly ubiqitous mobile WebKit, the website rendering engine used by the web browser on the iPhone and Google’s Android platform (available today on the T-Mobile G1) as well as some Nokia Symbian devices. It’s also the web engine behind the forthcoming Palm Pre. The core WebKit engine also powers Apple’s desktop Safari browser, and Google’s new Chrome browser.
As with any mobile project, there were two core principals that guided us. First, make it readable: minimize the amount of scrolling necessary and optimize the font for the small screen. Second, make it fast: minimize mobile load time by cutting unnecessary and weighty graphics and keeping the site light on client side scripting and complex styles.
If you have an iPhone or Android device, head on over to cmurrayconsulting.com and let us know what you think. We’ll be adding a check for other mobile WebKit devices, as well as a manual web address to check it out, soon.
The Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship’s blog has been featured on the WordPress Showcase. The blog, featuring three distinct “columns” (in the content, not design sense of the word), engages is its readers with ideas and opinions on corporate citizenship.
We think this implementation’s most interesting features are under the hood. The blog needed to be integrated with BCCCC’s primary content management system – CitySoft CE. We developed a WordPress template that automatically pulls and caches the top navigation (drop downs and all) from its CitySoft counterpart.
On the CitySoft side, we developed a home page template that pulls the recent items (the Director’s Blog, and general news) from WordPress. The CitySoft template loads a cached version of the entire home page that refreshes ever hour, resulting in a “zippy” home page despite the number of complex elements, not to mention the site’s traffic. Most visitors never know they are switching between two completely different systems!
Continue reading “Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship” blog featured on WordPress Showcase
Slideshow of Recommended Reading screenshots
Have you noticed our new Software section? Many of our projects involve innovative “mini-applications” that have greater application beyond the immediate project. One of our goals is to abstract some of these projects or apply new skills from these projects into generally available software. We’ll probably charge for some premium applications, but sometimes we’d just like to give back to the open source, GPL community that’s given us fantastic platforms like WordPress.
This week we christened our Software section with a Google Reader plug in for WordPress called Recommended Reading: Google Reader Shared. The plug in, optimized for the latest major build of WordPress (2.7 at the time of writing), will let you easily feature selected items from any number of standard web feeds (be it a blog or company news) on your WordPress site. All you need is a free Google Reader account!
The plug-in is also available on the official WordPress plug-in repository, where we’ve had over 170 downloads in less than 100 hours.
Continue reading Google Reader WordPress Plugin
