The blog systems that made it as CMSes
Six years ago I blogged that open source CMSes tended to be too difficult to set up and use to be usable for small business and non-profits. I suggested that a number of blog systems and nukes could step forward and supplant them, and that is exactly what has happened.
In 2008, Joomla!, Wordpress and Drupal were the most popular open source CMSes, even though none of them started out as such. In 2009, these three still led the pack with a wide margin.
Wordpress and Drupal used to be blogging software, and Joomla! (formerly Mambo) was a so-called Nuke (a package for building web communities), but they quickly re-branded themselves:
- Joomla! – dynamic portal engine and content management system
- Wordpress – semantic personal publishing platform
- Drupal – open source content management system
I have used all three to build professional websites with. Wordpress is well suited for small websites for small businesses, and I have built websites for huge organisations with Drupal. Indeed, for the past two years Drupal-sites have accounted for almost all of the websites I produced, the exceptions being one small Moodle project and a PHPfox website.
Installing Wordpress really takes me no more than 10 minutes or so. (In my experience, a single person business wants to spend at most a few hundred euros on a regular, fairly static website, so if I decide to go with Wordpress I can spend the remaining hours on making the site look good, which in turn helps the customer to establish their brand.)
In light of these developments it may not be too far fetched to conclude that ease of use, perceived or imaginary, can be very important for the adoption rate of an open source product. Ask the Firefox developers. It wasn’t the plug-ins or the built in search engine field or the tabs that made the difference, but the fact that the webbrowser seemed to work the way laypeople expected a webbrowser to work.
Indeed, I know plenty of people who never use tabs, who only seem to get confused by them, and plenty of others who search the web by entering a search phrase into the address bar (in the latter case a savvy web dude like myself included). The only Firefox feature I have consistently heard people name as the reason to use that browser is its perceived security. Firefox is, as the head rabbi of the world once put it, the one that “keeps out the schmutz“.
[…] might become popular CMSes … they did! In 2010 and 2014 I followed up with articles exploring which of these tools had become popular and how they described themselves over time […]