We have used Plone, an open source content management system, on a large number of our projects. While there are certainly many fine CMS's, I was pretty excited to see that Plone was the most highly acclaimed CMS of the major platforms in an article published today at CMS Watch by Tony Byrne.
The study was "limited to the 40 major solutions we review in the Global and European editions of The Web CMS Report."
Byrne listed 30 different categories ranging from performance to access control to user generated content. For each category, he named the best CMS, gave several honorable mentions, and pointed out the products that are lagging.
So, I went ahead and gave scores for each category. If a CMS was listed as the best in a category, I gave it 2 points. If it got an honorable mention I gave it 1 point. And if it was found to be lagging in a category I subtracted 2 points.
The results?
Plone was the ONLY CMS in the entire list with a positive score! It came in WAY ahead of the big commercial CMS platforms (Interwoven, Vignette, Documentum, etc.), and handily beat all the other open source ones as well (Drupal, Typo3, Joomla!, etc.).
Best:
- Adherence to web standards
- Access control
Honorable Mention:
- Internationalization (ability to create multi-lingual websites)
- Aggregation
- User-generated content
- Micro-applications
- Active user groups (the wonderful Plone community)
- Best overall value
Plone was not specifically called out as lagging in any category, although for a few categories the article lists "all other CMS's" as lagging (including Plone in 3 cases). Actually, Plone had the fewest categories in which is was considered lagging of all the CMS's in the report.
Presumably Plone would have done even better if this was done a month or so from now when Plone 3.0 comes out.
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.
In order from best score to worst, here is how this point system ranks the 40 major CMS platforms as per CMS Watch.
| Best | HM | Lagging | Score | ||
| Plone | 2 | 6 | 3 | 4 | |
| Clickability | 1 | 3 | 3 | -1 | |
| CrownPeak | 1 | 6 | 5 | -2 | |
| Fatwire | 2 | 1 | 4 | -3 | |
| Day | 2 | 4 | 6 | -4 | |
| HotBanana | 4 | 4 | -4 | ||
| MediaSurface | 1 | 2 | 4 | -4 | |
| EPiServer | 1 | 3 | -5 | ||
| Hannon Hill | 1 | 1 | 4 | -5 | |
| Midgard | 1 | 3 | -5 | ||
| Oracle/Stellent | 1 | 3 | 5 | -5 | |
| RedDot | 1 | 3 | 5 | -5 | |
| Tridion | 3 | 1 | 6 | -5 | |
| e-Spirit | 1 | 4 | -6 | ||
| Ektron | 1 | 1 | 5 | -7 | |
| Escenic | 1 | 4 | -7 | ||
| PaperThin | 1 | 1 | 5 | -7 | |
| Serena | 1 | 1 | 5 | -7 | |
| CoreMedia | 2 | 5 | -8 | ||
| eZ Systems | 4 | -8 | |||
| Ingeniux | 2 | 5 | -8 | ||
| Interwoven | 1 | 4 | 7 | -8 | |
| Percussion | 1 | 2 | 6 | -8 | |
| Refresh Software | 2 | 5 | -8 | ||
| eZ Publish | 1 | 5 | -9 | ||
| Immediacy | 1 | 5 | -9 | ||
| Typo3 | 3 | 6 | -9 | ||
| TerminalFour | 5 | -10 | |||
| WebSideStory | 1 | 6 | -10 | ||
| GOSS | 1 | 6 | -11 | ||
| Drupal | 2 | 2 | 9 | -12 | |
| Enonic | 6 | -12 | |||
| IBM | 2 | 2 | 9 | -12 | |
| Documentum | 3 | 8 | -13 | ||
| Joomla! | 1 | 1 | 8 | -13 | |
| SiteCore | 2 | 3 | 10 | -13 | |
| Vignette | 1 | 7 | -13 | ||
| OpenCMS | 7 | -14 | |||
| Microsoft | 5 | 10 | -15 | ||
| Alfresco | 1 | 2 | 10 | -16 |
Ive just been reading through the list... Your numbers are wrong.
Posted by: Lars | June 14, 2007 at 07:52 AM
They are? I'll go through them again and confirm, but can you point out specifically what I missed? It's definitely possible, though I would be surprised if I made more than an error or two.
One point on this:
If the "lagging" list said something like "all other CMS's", I did count that against all the CMS platforms that weren't mentioned.
Posted by: Scott Paley | June 14, 2007 at 12:26 PM
OK, going through the numbers again (I'm not done yet), I noticed that CMS Watch changed its report! For example, when I first posted this, Plone was not listed as lagging in any category. However, now it's listed as lagging in "Repository Services".
I will re-run the numbers and change my posting to reflect the existing CMS Watch report.
Posted by: Scott Paley | June 14, 2007 at 12:45 PM