It appears I upset Tony Byrne, the driving force behind CMS Watch (a FANTASTIC resource for anybody interested in content management systems), with my CMS scoring based on an overview he posted last week. Tony wrote:
For the record, there is no 'best CMS,' and all ranking exercises are futile."
And for the record, I am in complete agreement on some of what he wrote. As I wrote in my original post on the subject,
It's not terribly different from trying to evaluate who you'd rather draft for your fantasy baseball team, Albert Pujols or Jose Reyes. Well, it really depends, right? Do you want a huge advantage in speed with decent power, batting average, etc.? Or would you prefer a somewhat better average and a lot more power at the expense of great speed? The fact that what is best for me isn't necessarily what's best for you doesn't stop every publisher of fantasy baseball articles from compiling an overall scoring system.
Obviously picking a CMS is a more complex decision, and there are lot more variables involved than in picking a fantasy baseball team, but that doesn't mean it's not interesting to run numbers like this. Just don't take them too seriously. Even a product that is at the bottom of the list can absolutely be the product best suited for your project.
One final note - I did publish the full spreadsheet that visually shows each product and how it performed in every category in which it was mentioned. It's fine to completely discount the scoring as Tony does, but I do think at the very least having a spreadsheet like this can be a useful tool for anyone picking a web CMS.
That said, I do think there is some small value in having a shorthand to see how different products compare to each other. If a CMS is found lagging in 10 different areas and isn't given a single "kudos", while another gets 3 kudos and is found lagging in 4 areas, why is that not interesting?"Now, clearly nobody should choose a CMS based on an aggregate score like this. What's important to me (scalability and performance) might not be what's important to you (internationalization). So weigh these categories accordingly."
It's not terribly different from trying to evaluate who you'd rather draft for your fantasy baseball team, Albert Pujols or Jose Reyes. Well, it really depends, right? Do you want a huge advantage in speed with decent power, batting average, etc.? Or would you prefer a somewhat better average and a lot more power at the expense of great speed? The fact that what is best for me isn't necessarily what's best for you doesn't stop every publisher of fantasy baseball articles from compiling an overall scoring system.
Obviously picking a CMS is a more complex decision, and there are lot more variables involved than in picking a fantasy baseball team, but that doesn't mean it's not interesting to run numbers like this. Just don't take them too seriously. Even a product that is at the bottom of the list can absolutely be the product best suited for your project.
One final note - I did publish the full spreadsheet that visually shows each product and how it performed in every category in which it was mentioned. It's fine to completely discount the scoring as Tony does, but I do think at the very least having a spreadsheet like this can be a useful tool for anyone picking a web CMS.
"Very deliberately there was no 'CMS Watch data' and to arbitrarily assign numbers is totally lame.