The CMS Word on the Tweet
Ye playboys and playgirls
Ain’t a-gonna run my world,
Not now or no other time
- PLAYBOYS AND PLAYGIRLS
Like many others, I use Twitter Search to listen to the word on the street in the areas about which I’m passionate. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of searches for “CMS“. In this case, however, the problem I have is that very few people are talking about the kind of CMS product in which I am interested. To illustrate this, have a look at the search for “CMS” using one of my favourite visualisers – the Twitter Stream Graph.
Twitter Visualiser for "CMS"
You probably can’t see the detail here (click the image to see the current stream), but it is clear that when most Twitter users say CMS, they mean WordPress, Drupal or Joomla!. There’s always a big PHP strand in there too.
So I panicked a bit. I know WordPress (from this blog, mainly). We very occasionally see Drupal in a vendor selection, and never see Joomla! at all. I’ve never been involved in an implementation with either. In fact, the technology team where I work is 45% .NET, 45% Java and 10% Misc. We tend to avoid PHP, Python, Perl and other scripting languages for various reasons which I won’t go in to here. So, are we really that out of touch?
I thought I’d dig around a bit more. I found the CMS Focus: CMS Report’s Top 30 Web Applications article and, of the 30, I’ve heard of about 60%. But we only implement 2 (SharePoint and Alfresco). That’s 7% of the top CMS products. Not very good.
So I tried the Open Jason 50 Content Management Systems list for a bit more choice. Of the 50, I’d only ever heard of about 10, most of which are blogging platforms (TypePad, MoveableType, Blogger and WordPress. Drupal and Joomla! are there. But this list is a year old, and the only new ones that have come onto my radar recently are Silverstripe (now available on the Microsoft Web Platform Installer) and GoodBarry. The rest have names like Moodle, Pligg, Triggit, Jogango and Weebly which just make me feel old . And we’ve never implemented any of these for a client, excluding simple blogs. So that is 0 / 50, or 0%. Things are going from bad to worse. Had a look at the 52 More Content Management Systems from the same source. Got a bit better there. Heard of maybe 20, and actually implemented three (Alfresco, eZ Publish and LifeRay).
I needed a more recent list, I think. Found 10 Promising Content Management Systems by Jacob Gube. Heard of 5, implemented 0. It’s getting desparate.
Fortunately, it seems, the clients that we work with don’t play in this space either. Just to reassure myself, I re-checked the list in my bible (that’s CMS Watch). Still good there. Of the 42 vendors covered, I’ve dealt with about 70% of them, and been on projects with about 50% of them.
Which brings me to my point. There are two worlds out there, in which the term CMS means something different. The Big Wide World, and My World.
To the Big Wide World (which includes Twitter, and all the sites I’ve mentioned above), CMS means “Free Open Source CMS with Low Cost of Ownership”. The commercial Open Source CMS solutions don’t make the cut either. Four of the five Open Source CMS products reviewed by CMS Watch (Drupal, Joomla!, Plone CMS and TYPO3) live in both worlds. Open CMS doesn’t as my feeling is it is a bit too complex. Alfresco, DotNetNuke and ez Publish made one of the lists above, but don’t really feature in the Tweetosphere.
I inhabit a world populated by analysts, commercial vendors, systems integrators, large agencies and other such creatures. I don’t believe we pay much attention to the other world until a product jumps the gap. And it seems difficult for a product that isn’t Java or Microsoft based to make it in to My World.
Looking at it from the other side, it seems difficult for a product that is Java or Microsoft to make it into the Big Wide World. There are very few good open source Microsoft (which I don’t find surprising) and Java (which I do) CMS systems. The open source community has embraced the scripting languages. If anyone has a simple, easy to use, Java based CMS that they really like, I’d love to hear from them.
In my head, the two worlds are still quite far apart. My “web generation” is extremely uncomfortable even calling WordPress a Content Management System. But the scary thing is that I suspect that I’m probably completely wrong on this. The two worlds might collide sooner than I think. Or maybe they have already and I just didn’t see it happen.
P.S. Here are two great posts that highlight various super cool Twitter visualisers:
- 6 Unique Twitter Visualizations by Ben Parr
- 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe by Nathan Yau (a year old but still cool)
P.P.S. The Open Source CMS Market Survey by Ric Shreves gives a really good overview of the Open Source CMS market. I wish I’d read that before I wrote this blog entry.
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A more commercial questions should be along the lines of – does the client really need the large “enterprise” CMS along with it’s associated costs (vendor, implementation, hosting, support) or does the one with the trndy name od the job instead.
Imagine, in a really basic example, content aimed at a teeensage market- they would probably be more familiar with one of the open source ones and is probabl a more intelligent choice for the client provided that the editorial costs of running it are low enough. I am assuming here that the editorial cost side of a enterprise vendor CMS are significantly cheaper and more flexible than the open source one – if not they need to be worrying a lot.
CMS is certainly still a market full of many players, large and small. As a CMS provider, you’re basically promising people that they can express themselves on the web. What that means changes wildly depending on the individual, organization, and needs.
Sometimes you’re talking about offline software, sometimes it is consumer focused, sometimes its FOSS (free) and sometimes it’s got a license fee in the 6 figures…
My personal opinion is this is like the automobile industry in the early 20th century – there’s so much interest because everyone sees a huge potential there, and no one has it right yet..
Well, except us of course.. http://concrete5.org is the best cms ever. And it’s free. Of course it is PHP based, you know, good enough for facebook & countless other big players… – but yeah separate conversation..
Of course, getting the word out about concrete5 is, to put it mildly, an uphill battle. You’re right there’s just so much noise and miscommunication about what CMS is and should be, that it’s hard to even get on the radar.
Curiously, I did the same Twitter search recently and then decided that I could not find anything of use in there. Too many blog applications and not enough of what I think is a real CMS. Looking at Wikipedia for WCMS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content_management_system) I found “A web content management system (WCMS or Web CMS) is content management system (CMS) software, usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions.”
So wait, WordPress does do that, doesn’t it? Going through that page any further hoping to kick out WordPress does not really help matters – it is listed! SDL Tridion? No where to be found (corrected now though)!!
I think I’ll just have to live with the fact that there are CMSs for the individual, small businesses and big busisnesses. But the line where one starts and the other ends is very fuzzy. I shall continue to integrate SDL Tridion and WordPress together for customers just to make life even more complicated.
From time to time, I get the same feeling. You get the same sense with regional players — whenever I’m in a new country talking content management with people, I find out about 20 new systems they consider to be major players that I’ve never heard of.
But it makes sense, since a CMS is many different things to many different people. And there’s literally thousands around — last time someone tried to count: Bob Doyle came up with 1800 (and that was several years ago).
If anything, the term CMS is becoming more common. Ten years ago, I had a hard time explaining to people what I was doing. Now, they just tend to oversimplify the kinds of problems a large-scale implementation deals with (and compare it to their own blog running on WordPress). I’m not being elitist about this — it’s just a completely different scenario.
So your problem isn’t that you’re out of sync with the world moving on. And there’s no need to panic. The problem isn’t that you’re not up to date, the problem is that it’s becoming harder to filter out information about systems that are relevant to you and the scenarios *you* are dealing with
Glad I am not alone! But you live in my world. Don’t you think that the boundary between “what you think is a real CMS” and the products you look at it getting blurry? Could you attempt a definition that isn’t based on perception or cost? I don’t think it is that easy to do. The Open Source/Commercial split is the best I can come up with. Which is sad, cause I love Open Source.
Do you do any better than me when reading through the list of CMS’s on the sites I’ve mentioned above? Has Tridion ever gone head to head with any one them on an RFP?
And good to see Tridion on the Wikipedia list. At least someone good came from my post
Great post! An enjoyable read for a Sunday evening. I’m a wordpress fan myself and use it across a number of sites.
I would love it though if -
Google builds a CMS that would work best with a Google Android OS Netbook. I’m a big fan of Google too and would love to see the netbook run off cloud computing. Their products almost cover your daily needs.
Sorry going off in a tangent here lol…
Hi Jon!
There’s very clearly a selection effect based upon the context of the word CMS. Isn’t that why vendors make liberal use of the word “Enterprise” to differentiate themselves?
“Your world” is dominated by clients who are used to spending money on their infrastructure. There’s a strong distrust of free products. Probably justified on the premise that if “it was any good they’d charge money for it”. Then there’s the: “who do I shout at if something breaks?”…
But I think this is a generational thing. As people who’ve grown up with the internet always “being there” reach upper management the revolution will have happened without a shot.
(Can you even imagine an office environment without computers? I can barely imagine one without an internet connection…)
The fact that the scripting communities are now centred around stacks is also telling (Ruby+Rails, Python+Django, PHP+Drupal). It certainly feels like the tide is coming in. Still, who knows when? They have some big disadvantages such as the very difficult task of “getting their message out there” (e.g. franz’s post). Not to mention the low barrier to entry leading to a lot of poor examples to ruin the reputation (such as the connotations of “PHP”).
Interesting times!
Cheers
Carlos
Hi Jon,
Good post – something I’ve been heavily dealing with lately.
A list you didn’t mention but that’s been around a long time, and which I use often: http://www.cmsmatrix.org.
I don’t think you need to panic, but we all do need to monitor what’s going on in the open source arena – it’s evolving quickly, and I believe that soon we will see open source options that can meet the needs of an increasing number of enterprises.
@Rory – the important issue is not who your audience is (e.g. teenagers), but what functionality you need. Even a publisher who targets teenagers may need enterprise-class capabilities that the open source offerings don’t provide.
@franz – I like your comment that CMS vendors are “promising people that they can express themselves on the web.” However, I’d now add that an increasing number of vendors are now promising that their software can provide audience participation/increased stickiness or loyalty/community via Web 2.0 capabilities.
@Jon – You did a good job of listing the enterprise features that most often rule out open source options: scalability, supportability, performance, workflow, security, localisation/globalisation. A couple more I’d add:
o separation of content from presentation
o implementation of the concept of “content types”
o multi-site capabilities
o granular privileges
o role- and group-based security
o integration with LDAP, Active Directory…
o digital asset management
o integration with translation services
o variable templating
o a robust api
o sandboxing
There are a few open source solutions closing in on meeting these needs. The next few years are going to be fun to watch.
An age-old discussion topic, and one that is always interesting. The term CMS is widely abused, and ever evolving.
I think you’ll find that your particular search results will be more interesting if you use the terminology of the vendors themselves, specifically, OpenText serves the WCM market. The term CMS is still developer centric, where as WCM encapsulates the space as defined by the analysts and such. Now, what end-users (those who are non technical) end up searching for when expressing their own needs, that’s an entirely different story!
Hope this helps your research.
This is another great post Jon (I seem to remember you saying that you couldn’t write when we met in Sweden the other week???)
Having been through all the implementation phases with content management projects within various organisations, from html sites to bespoke systems to enterprise solutions and now proprietary mid-market systems and also worked for CMS vendors too – I’ve found it almost always comes back to a case that CMS Watch has long promoted – ‘best fit’
The reality is the vast majority of websites out there only have a small number of editors at most and simply don’t require the functionality offered by the longer standing business orientated .NET and Java based solutions – hence there is very little ‘community orientated’ coverage of them. The entry level licence points of most proprietary CMS solutions mean they will never be on the radar of the majority of website operators (hence not even mentioned in Wikipedia lists for instance).
You have operated very much in that 5% of organisations globally that require more from their web presence and regard it as ‘mission critical’ and will therefore be drawn to what they see as being ‘enterprise proven’.
The long standing ‘scare positioning’ against free and open source that I have used myself in the past is 1. over-reliance on those with technical knowledge to build and maintain the solution and 2. often not having one person/point of contact who can be shouted at/fired/not paid as and when something goes wrong.
My current project is a global website deployment using a proprietary CMS but during the 12 month period it has been running so far I have been using Joomla and its various plug-in components on a personal project. In terms of the ability for a non-technical power user to create a website from scratch and add in core functionality I would rate Joomla as superior to the proprietary CMS I am currently using and those I’ve used previously.
However – when it comes to devolving editing and administration to others around the organisation then the proprietary solution wins out as it is far more intuitive and easy to use. From a business perspective, user adoption is and will continue to be the top measure for Return On Investment. When issues have arisen they are resolved very quickly – in contrast to the many hours I have wasted in evenings and weekends trying to find answers to Open Source component problems in the community forums. There are also a whole bunch of cowboys out there hanging on the shirt tails of open source and it’s easy for the uninitiated to get burnt.
As you well know, many CMS implementations are driven by those with a business and marketing focus and the Open Source communities are still very much steeped in participants with a clear disliked and disdain for anyone ‘non-technical’. It is here that the proprietary providers have advanced most in being able to engage effectively with all audiences and decision makers within an organisation – they’ve had to as it is more than likely that the ‘non-techies’ are paying the bill!
From discussions I’ve had over the last year or so with agencies such as yours, open source CMS is undoubtedly crossing the divide and I think this will accelerate in the next year or so, particularly with governments starting to mandate its use. If the big open source communities can start to engage more effectively with non-technical participants then they will move forward a lot faster in enterprise adoption and push the proprietary providers into an even smaller percentage of the market. A bloodbath? You bet!!!
James, that is quite some comment. It’s longer than my post. And wiser, too.
I really like they way you put this: “push the proprietary providers into an even smaller percentage of the market”. I think that is exactly how it is going to play out. Be interested to see just how small it gets.
Also, maybe it would be useful is all CMS products declared the level of technieness of their target markets? Most of the smaller vendors in the lists above are targeted entirely at non-developers. The next level up could be those that can produce a site without a developer, but can also be extended. Next would come those that need a techie to install at set up. From there we’d move on to the products that need a few developers and possibly even a Managed Services/Support team to maintain. I’ve never though about it this way. Interesting …
And I’m looking forward to the bloodbath!
Jon, as I mentioned before, I like this article of yours. I posted comments on my blog.
I personally think there is room for propriety companies to move into open source territory just as much as open source is moving into areas dominated by propriety software. For instance, at the same time Microsoft is pushing SharePoint they are also pushing PHP solutions onto IIS and making it easier for users to download open source applications onto the server via the Microsoft Web Platform.
People who need to work with both open source and propriety management systems will definitely start looking much more closely at those products/projects that have implemented CMIS.
…oh and “one more thing”… CMS Watch also covers WordPress. But it’s in our Social Software report (http://www.cmswatch.com/Social/Report/) as “blog software” (together with Movable Type and Blogger), not in the Web CMS Report. That may be adding on to the dichotomy, but I don’t think WordPress would be very well suited to any of the scenarios we describe in the Web CMS Report, whereas there are several Social Software scenarios for which it’s a great fit.
Athough I admit I haven’t read your Social Software report, it seems to be the least firmly defined of all the CMS Watch “areas”. If you look at your CMS Vendor Map, the red SoCo line is a real motley crew of vendors. Unlike the other lines, you’d often pick and mix many of the products on there. Many of them really don’t compete with one another. There is a nice mix of third party communities, big server side Commnuity Servers (EPiServer should be on there too following their NetStar integration), SaaS Community Add-ons, Blogging Platforms, Wiki’s, CMS systems (Drupal, Plone, Fatwire and the biggies) and more. I predict big changes to the way thlis looks in the Vendor Map of 2010.
Did you see my other post about this vendor map. Had a few questions for you guys: http://jonontech.com/2009/03/09/cms-watch-subway-vendor-map-2009/ – I’d love a response to that
>If anyone has a simple, easy to use, Java based CMS that they really like, I’d love to hear from them.
Please take a look then at Jahia (www.jahia.org). Quite similar in term of end of use to a PHP solution such as: http://concrete5.org but JEE based and with better support for all enterprise wide features (clustering, multilanguage, site factory, workflows, LDAP/AD, WebDAV,…)
I was watching #CMS today and having that exact same thought. All I ever see in there is constant comments about blogging platforms, and I think many have summed up the why quite well. But I think there is another point to be made here. We in the WCM industry keep focusing on the art of managing content, rather that the art of delivering websites that deliver the intended results and at the desired level. What I mean is we’re still looking at all this stuff as low level tools to edit sites. It needs to be easy, it needs to have x,y and Z features. I loved your Oh CMS, Deliver Me post, because you make some great points about what you want from a vendor.
I’ve been thinking about that post as we got ready to launch our Online Marketing Suite announcement and wondered what you might think about a vendor bringing a lot of the tools together that you are currently integrating today. While I totally agree that we vendors shouldn’t box you into using our embedded out integrated tools(like MVT, or campaign mgmt), shouldn’t we vendors be trying to not only allow companies manage content more effectively, but allow them to build and manage more effective websites? Sites that generate more conversions, build more engagement, drive more revenue.
Now, I fully realize that technology alone can’t do this. This is just as much about people and process, but shouldn’t we (as vendors) be looking for ways to get the technology out of the way? Assuming of course, it’s not half baked technology (cooked up for some random customer), but well architected stuff, that’s pluggable and with lots of hooks and events to plug into other technologies. Shouldn’t we be bringing together all the technology that is needed to build websites that deliver the results their marketers are striving for? I think for the longest time, we WCM vendors just tried to be all things to all people, and I think that time is comming to an end. You are seeing vendors like us (Sitecore) and Interwoven and even Tridion start to focus on trying to solve the real business problem, not just offer tools and components. IMHO, that’s where the commercial world will start to really differentiate and pull away from the open source world and the average content management needs. Anyhow, I talk more about how we’re thinking about the market from a WCM vendor standpoint on my blog, but great topic as always.
Such gorgeous work. Reminds me of polish poster design.
I can only assume the term ePenis can be used in this referrence if using CMS increases your ability to perform. Just sayin’ (I’ve never actually heard that term, believe it or not)
Hey there, You’ve done an excellent job. I will definitely digg it and for my part suggest to my friends. I’m sure they will be benefited from this website.
Sometimes I contemplate if folks truly take time to compose something original, or are they only just dishing out words to fill a site. This certainly doesn’t fit that mold. Thank you for taking the time to write with awareness. Once In A While I look at a page and question whether they even proofread it.Fantastic work with this article.
[...] to illustrate: about a year ago, I read Jon Mark’s blog post: “when most Twitter users say CMS, they mean WordPress, Drupal or Joomla!. [...] So I [...]
Good point. Something I didn’t make clear in the above. I believe that their are a lot of reasons why our clients don’t use the open source products. Some of these reasons are valid, while others probably aren’t. But this is certainly a topic for another (very long) posting.
And yes, I think the Enterprise CMS Vendors should be worrying. They can only hold off the next generation of product for so long. And again, that’s another posting for the future
Thanks for commenting. I must confess I’m not panicing yet
I’m just a bit worried that I should be.
Every now and again I wonder if these lightweight systems might actually do a decent job in place of an Enterprise System. What are the main features that make them unsuitable for the projects with budgets in the hundreds of thousands (or millions) of £££/$$$? Is it more about the clients’ reluctance to take a risk, their lack of faith in the small vendor, the feeling that the product is too cheap for their big aims, or about real product features. If it is the latter, are these features more about the non-functional requirements (reliability, scalability, supportability, performance, etc) or “enterprise level” functional requirements (say workflow, security, localisation/globalisation to name a few).
Just to make sure no-one misunderstands me, I do firmly believe than on 90% of the projects I work on, the commercial CMS we use was the correct choice or, at the very least, a good choice. However, on the other 10%, I’ve seen some pretty expensive bloatware where something much, much, much simpler could have done an equivalent (or better?) job …
Would love to hear your thoughts.
Jon
I think you’ve summed it up nicely
I think, in general, that people who’ve been exposed to several systems (from the very simple to the highly complex), or are at least aware of the differences, won’t find it too hard to decide whether a project could be done with a “simple” solution or whether it really requires something with more (specific) capabilities.
The problem — as I see it — as that people will usually stick to what they know (which is often just two or three systems), think that’s the whole breadth of the CMS landscape and end up choosing Ferrari’s to haul furniture or trucks to enter F1.
To someone who’s aware of the landscape and knows where to get detailed info — like you — I would say: don’t shy away from the “cheap and simple” solutions, since they can be incredibly (cost) effective. As long as you know what the limitations are.
As for what those limitations are — well, like I said, you’ve summed it up nicely, and it’s pretty much “all of the above”.
Maybe more interestingly, when I reviewed WordPress, I ended up thinking “this is a great system for blogging — I hope they don’t add a bunch of features for web content management because that’d turn it into a really mediocre CMS”. The lightweight systems run a real risk of losing their advantages when they try to evolve into something more — there’s already plenty of solutions out there doing the same, and having been at it for years.
Oh, and just to make sure I don’t seem to be advocating and/or blaming WordPress: I used it as an example since this blog is running on it, so it seemed apt.
Yep. It is on WordPress, which works pretty well. Problem is, I was lazy and put it on WordPress.com instead of hosting it myself. I blame the beers. Anyway, regretting that already. For example, with the theme I chose, it isn’t possible to only show snippets on the home page isn’t of full postings. Which is a 1 line code change if I host it myself. And their embedded google analytics suck too.
I guess I’ll have to move it at some point. Win some, lose some.
Thanks for the reply, Bill. The discussion is getting quite busy!
Yes, I know all about CMS Matrix and other CMS sites that deal with the “mainstream” vendors. Really like James Robertson’s stuff too. I find these sources tend to cover the same systems, which makes life easier for us. I was aiming to highlight the proliferation of the little guys.
I like your list of Enterprise features. Probably worth expannding on this in a full post one day. I still think the NFRs are the main differentiators, though.
And finally, I’m not really panicking. The Dylan lyrics used as the intro to this post sum up my feeling better
I like your explanation of the terminology. When I wrote this, I did try to do some Twitter visualisations for “WCM”, “WCMS” and “ECM”. The problem was that the channels were really quiet. Which makes sense, of course, as there are far far more developers out there than “analysts and such”.
Other problem with “CMS” is that it also gets referred to in Tweets like “Help. 20cms of snow” and new recent batch about the size of one’s ePenis
Keep up the great work Jon. This post has even persuaded me to sign-up for Twitter as this insight is very useful. I thought I was doing so well to hold out and resist but ‘being in the know’ is a powerful draw.