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.

The study offers quantitative evidence validating the strategic recommendations we’ve offered clients throughout 2009. C. Murray Consulting Oomph is a technology and platform agnostic firm that believes different solutions fit different client needs. But when the decision comes down to open source content management platform selection for clients with custom needs, we’ve made our default position clear: WordPress or Drupal, depending on the need. And it looks like CMS adopters who have taken the time to evaluate different platforms are coming to the same conclusion.

On Joomla! – and ease vs. quality

Joomla took the top spot in the survey when it came to overall market share by a small but statistically significant margin, even though it lagged in satisfaction compared to the other leaders. We’re not surprised by this either, and believe there are two related driving forces.

The first is implementation cost vs quality: anyone who has developed a professional website on a CMS – commercial or open – will tell you that the real potential costs aren’t in the software, but in the services. As developers and tech-savvy strategists, we love the API and “platform” offered by WordPress and Drupal that open the door to the level of customization and control that hit the clients’ sweet spot.

Rather than do a C+ job incorporating 99% of what the potential CMS market might need, WordPress has focused on doing an A+ job with the “fat middle”: the 80-85% of features that almost everyone needs. It couples those with a first rate framework and API that enables capable developers to add in almost any niche or “long tail” feature. In fact, the core WordPress framework is so capable that a handful of “intermediary” frameworks have emerged.

That’s good news if a CMS-seeking client has a budget for development and customization. The end product will be closer to the client’s vision without the “bloat” of the 15% worth of unneeded niche features. But if there’s little to no budget for professional customization, and the client needs some long tail features (most will need at least a few), WordPress and Drupal could present challenges solved with relative ease (if not elegance) by drag and drop in Joomla.

Think of this dilemma in the frame of “FrontPage vs writing HTML” in the early days of web development. A poll of adoption would probably favor FrontPage – because almost anyone can pick it up and cobble a site together, even with virtually no  budget. A poll of satisfaction would almost certainly favor hiring an HTML developer.

The “easy to setup” versus “quality” dilemma is magnified with Drupal. The Drupal “core” offers incredible developer flexibility, even through its administrative user interface. Nearly every other content management component – even the visual content editor – are distinct modules. The result is a product that shifts the equation even further towards greater control and customization, at the expense of even greater implementation cost.

But the report data also suggests another dimension to this statistic: historic trends. It’s important to remember that WordPress’ roots are in blogging, not holistic site content management – a “sticky” reputation unfair to its current capabilities. This is important context in considering the data.

We would argue that WordPress only really began to emerge as a solid holsitic CMS option around v2.5. That was back in March 2008; only 1.5 years ago. Keep in mind that use in 2009 does not reflect adoption in 2009. The 2009 use survey includes sites built at any point in time. Numbers more likely to portray present adoption and interest in 2009 seem to favor WordPress, including the “evaluation vs adoption” chart above, and the weekly downloads chart below.

Second, in the vertical that WordPress has long mastered – blogging – its dominance is overwhelming. The implication coincides where our “99% theory”: in areas where WordPress may not be the 99% solution “out of the box”, it lags. But in specific sub-markets where it does fill the 99% need and competes 1:1 on “effortless, out of the box” features, it becomes the overwhelming preference.

In short, while Joomla can be a good solution for clients with complex needs and limited implementation budgets, the more discerning client willing to invest in development is more likely to be satisfied with WordPress or Drupal.

What happened to DotNetNuke?

We’re also not surprised by the placement of DotNetNuke at the bottom of the pack. An early leader in the open CMS space, the entire “Nuke” family is showing its age. As a result of an old code base and outdated framework, high levels of complexity – and hence, cost – are often necessary to create satisfactory results that can be achieved quickly and cost effectively with more modern alternatives. Incorporating the type of beautiful, modern design that today’s consumers expect is unnecessarily difficult. Content and site administration is kludgey and tedious compared with modern, elegant systems like WordPress.

In terms of brand sentiment, DotNetNuke placed dead last in our survey, with well over 50% of the respondents labeling their feelings toward the system as negative. Not only was DotNetNuke one of only two systems to receive more negative than positive responses, it received a significantly higher number of negative responses.

-2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, page 68

We’ve done a few WordPress demos for DotNetNuke users, and the amazement at the leap forward in administration is often apparent. In many instances, we are confident that the deployment and migration cost of a WordPress solution may yield savings compared with the total cost of ownership for ongoing DotNetNuke support in less than 1-2 years.

All of the charts and quantitative data contained in this post were from the cited report. Be sure to check it out!