CMS Trends
Content Management Systems Market Share
We last looked at market share of web content management systems in 2011 so we thought it was time for an update.
Last time we looked, WordPress had a 14% market share of the entire web. Now its higher. WordPress is used by 17.7% of all the websites, that is a content management system market share of 54.9% (as many websites don't use a recognisable content management system at all).
WordPress now claim to serve 65 million websites, up from 50 million 22 months ago. This includes hosted blogs.
Best of the Rest
Joomla has maintained it's position as No.2 CMS with a 2.7% market share. Drupal is in 3rd place with 2.3%. Blogger (Google Blogs) has overtaken vBulletin with 1.3% of the web.
Top content management systems May 2013
How to read the diagram from Web Technology Surveys:
67.8% of the websites use none of the content management systems that are monitored.
WordPress is used by 17.7% of all the websites, that is a content management system market share of 54.9%.
Trends
The trends look good for WordPress. It's growth continues, and it is actively maintained and updated. New releases are generally welcomed by the community.
Trends
And not so good for Joomla. However Joomla has been much more active recently, so it will be worth watching to see if it can recover. Drupal appears to be in the midst of an internal restructuring so we will see how things change in the next 12 months. However it's a firm favourite with a loyal band of developers so it's not likely to disappear any time soon.
CMS Everywhere?
This graph shows the decline in websites that don't use a content management system at all (that we could detect).
It's goes from over 80% in 2010 to under 70% today. That's a drop of 15% in 3 years.
Decline of sites with no cms
The trend does seem to be flattening out, but here at 2020Media, we would say most - say 70% of new websites we host use a content management system.
Why use a CMS?
Content Management Systems (CMS) give non technical people the tools to add/edit web pages. Using a CMS running a website becomes all about the content and not the ins and outs of how it works. With a CMS a user doesn't need to understand html or any other type of coding, a CMS allows a website owner to concentrate on the important stuff, the content.
Benefits:
- Lower setup and operating costs
- Website Owners keep control over site content
- Page styles can be changes from a single source file
- Multiple users can update a site at once
Why NOT use a CMS
- Lack of personality - many CMS based sites use off the shelf templates and don't look distintive or truly reflect the company or person they are about.
- Lack of quality - A CMS can allow anyone to edit the site - and as it's now so easy, this job is sometimes delegated to someone inadequately trained to do justice to the job. A website is your company or your personality on the web. Should it really be controlled by someone you barely trust to make the tea?
- Poor design - When designing a site from scratch, a good designer will seek to find the right calls to action. Some CMS based sites are a morass of irrelevant information with no clear priority given to the most important content. But good design work can overcome this and succeed with a CMS.
- Security - security is the bugbear of all CMS systems - they are victims of their own success and a target for hackers. Bad actors can target thousands of sites with the same attack script and will get some success. A hand coded site rarely gets attacked in the first place - even though it may still contain vulnerabilities. If someone is going after you in particular neither option is a guarantee of safety.
2020Media is a UK host specialising in hosting popular content mangement systems like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. We also provide standard PHP, ASP, Java and ColdFusion hosting platforms for any website.
Joomla User Group April 2013
A quick roundup of the last London Joomla User group meeting, which took place on Tuesday 16 April 2013.
The meeting was streamed for the first time, as an experiment but the feedback from the tester was positive so hopefully remote participation will become availabe in future months.
Our main discussion centred around future developments in Joomla. Chris Davenport, one of the main Joomla developers, has made a major push to create a Web Services API for Joomla. He argues, Joomla really needs this to allow data to be consumed across a wide array of platforms and devices. As an example a native mobile app would benefit from a true API to Joomla rather than the usual hodge podge of techniques that are practically written from scratch each time. He's created a Kickstarter project to raise some funds.
In related news, Joomla have recently made announcement saying the Joomla platform is being renamed a framework. This has apparently been done to allow a faster development of the underlying Joomla codebase, of which the Joomla CMS that is what we all use, is just an application of that codebase. The idea Joomla can be used for other things besides websites.
Our discussions went to the usual problem solving open forum and there were lots of good questions and suggested solutions.
Of note was a Firefox plugin called User Agent Switcher - this allows you to appear to sites as (for example) Googlebot - the search engines directory spider. This can be of particular use to track down malware. Some malware that infects Joomla/PHP sites only reveals itself to Googlebot in an attempt to poison the search results.
Security was a topic revisited and Login Failed Log was mentioned - though this is more for information than prevention. Basic security measure like using a complex password and not using the default username of admin or administrator were critical.
Other items mentioned in passing includes:
- Website Optimisation Seminar (free): www.houseofkaizen.com/conversion-optimisation-seminar-london
- CRM for non-profits: www.civiCRM.org
- New computer/human interface: Leapmotion.com
- Security device using webcam in neat way: demopass.co.uk
- Compare the size (in lines of code) of Joomla, Drupal etc: Ohloh.net
- Joomla sandbox: Molajo - still continuing
- Joomla 1.5 - gets the time wrong in Daylight Saving (summer time): Joomla 1.5 extensions
What is Joomla?
Joomla is one of the top 3 most popular web content management systems on the planet and it currently powers almost 3% of all the world's websites. It is an entirely community-driven project and does not employ any paid staff to work on its development. It is mostly written in PHP and is available for free under the GNU/GPL v2 or later license. You can find out more here: www.joomla.org.
2020Media is a UK Joomla host that offers specialist knowledge of Joomla including web hosting, migrations and troubleshooting. To find out more see: www.2020media.com/joomla
Joomla! User Group London is for anyone of any experience to discuss and promote Joomla! in London. It's free to attend and meets on the third Tuesday of every month.
CiviCRM User Group
The UK CiviCRM user group meeting took place last night in London. We were there, and this is our report.
CiviCRM meetup
The meetup was hosted at techhub, in London's "Silicon Roundabout", Old Street. Our host for the evening was Michael McAndrew of Third Sector Design, a company specialising in CiviCRM based in techhub.
Meet-ups are free and a great way to get to learn more about CiviCRM and are suitable for those that are new to CiviCRM as well as people that have been using it for years. There were two presentations, a mingle session and a case study report from a charity that's successfully implemented CiviCRM.
CiviCRM in 2012
The keywords for 2012 are: mobile, scalable, community.
CiviCRM
A code sprint (?) scheduled for later this month in London will be focusing on CiviMobile. CiviCRM for mobile devices includes iPhone, Android, iPad, Blackberry and more. This version will include the ability to view/search contacts and see most of the details of each contact. It will also allow users to create/edit contacts, and handle event attendee check-in. Several core developers will be in town and any developers are welcome to join.
CiviCon is taking place in San Fransisco on 2nd April. CiviCon is THE annual event bringing together the people who use, develop, design and implement CiviCRM. Good news for us in the UK though, a CiviCon Europe is planned for Autumn, although dates and location have not yet been finalised.
CiviCRM 4.1 News
- Beta release for WordPress - along with Drupal and Joomla, CiviCRM will now work within WordPress. WordPress has emerged from it's blogging roots to become one of the most widely used content managment systems in use today, powering an amazing 14% of the web.
- Social plugins (Facebook, Twitter etc).
- Better cron (simple for admins to setup).
- Personalisation of campaign pages for events (think JustGiving).
- Improvement to admin menu.
A couple of UK specific projects were mentioned, with a call for some help from developers or sponsors to get them completed. These are Direct Debit integration and Gift Aid. The Direct Debit integration is a "make it happen" project, which basically is a call for funding, and the Gift Aid module needs a bit of development help to fix some not too tricky bugs.
CiviCRM Marketing
The new CiviCRM website
Dave Moreton, from Bristol based Circle Interactive, talked to the group about improving the marketing of CiviCRM. It's apparent that next to the giant forces of SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics etc, CiviCRM has a much lower profile. It's also true that it's a very different product. That said, the non-profit, membership, civic sector are often unaware of the existence of CiviCRM and end up using a commercial-focused CRM system that is less than ideal. David's talk was about efforts within the CiviCRM community to increase awareness, talk up it's successes and provide comparisons and marketing material for system integrators to use. He finished by showing us a sneak peak at the new CiviCRM website, which of course aims to solve these issues.
If you are interested in helping, there are occasional IRC meets, an online group at civicrm.org/groups/marketing and PDFs, Powerpoint and how-to material at Spreadtheword
CiviCRM Case Study
Finally we heard from Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research (LLR). Parvez Saleh from Veda Consulting, talked us through the tasks that were needed for migrate in just 2 hours a complete legacy system to CiviCRM.
the LLR website
LLR went from a system that was used by just a few users which specialist knowledge (and lots and lots of spreadsheets), to a website-integrated CiviCRM system that can be accessed by 80+ users, speeds up the financial reporting functions and will save the charity tens of thousands over the next few years, as well as enabling increased fundraising. Now one of the largest CiviCRM installations in the UK, the system serves the needs of 350,000 contacts, 90,000+ participants and over 1.2 million contributions a year. LLR are now holding a "spreadsheet amnesty" to move all data onto the system.
Successful Event
The event was attended by around 50 people. Most were new to CiviCRM but we also met with system integrators, developers, current users and administrators. The user group meeting showed that there is an established infrastructure of support for CiviCRM here the UK, and organisations considering it for themselves can be confident they will get the support they need. 2020Media provides complete hosting packages for CiviCRM, and our support is based around our hosting expertise. Therefore we can deal with the kind of problems you might have if you get a error on a page, emails not being sent, uploading images and so on. We can also help users get to grips with the basics of using Civi. We also have a network of developers and consultants so get in touch if you want to know more.
Joomla User Group Report 17 Jan 2012
Joomla User Group - Jug - geddit?
The first London Joomla user group meeting took place at UCL on 17 January. The user group is open to all with an interest in Joomla and no level of technical knowledge is required. This meeting welcomed many new faces and we hope they'll join the user group again.
Joomla Template Overrides
There was no set agenda this month, but a topic that was explored in detail was template overrides. Joe from Softforge demonstrated the technique which allows you to modify the look and feel of your site in ways beyond what is built into the template options. By using template overrides you avoid modifying core Joomla files and this means you can update Joomla when you need to, without worrying about breaking your website. The technique is simple in essence, though finding the right files or files to move does require some knowledge, and asking the usergroup is a great place to get some help.
- Copy Joomla core file to appropriate location within template folder
- Modify copied file as required.
- Reload Joomla page (clearing cache if needed).
It was suggested that template overrides be covered in more detail in another user group meeting.
News from the Joomla eco-sphere
- Virtuemart out. The big daddy of Joomla shopping cart is finally released and feedback was good
- K2 out. A component the replaces the 'article' with more extendible functions. think of Joomla! articles with additional fields for article images, videos, image galleries and attachments.
- Rockettheme dropping Drupal. Popular Joomla template shop will stop developing themes for Drupal after low takeup.
- Joomla 2.5, the next long term stable release is due for release on 24 Jan. Joomla 1.5 reaches end of life in April 2012.
Mootools/jquery
Mootools is a bundle of javascript included in Joomla core and is often used for making sliders and pop up photo galleries. Many third-party extensions use the jquery javascript library for their functions and there is currently a debate around including jquery within Joomla core. At the moment you often get several copies of jquery loaded by different extensions (and often different versions of jquery at that!). The argument against adding jquery to Joomla core is that recently a lot of work has been focussed on making the core as lightweight as possible.
The next meeting is on February 21st. If you plan on attending, let us know at 2020Media and we'll see you there.
Usergroup Roundup and news from EU
It's been a busy week with a Joomla and WordPress usergroup sessions, as well as a meeting with Eurid, the registry for .eu domains.
Joomla Usergroup
The regular monthly meetup of the London Joomla usergroup took place on Tuesday. Phil from SoftForge gave us some insights into the Akeeba Backup tool. Many people already use the extension to make backups of their site. What is not so well know is that the Pro version (a very reasonable $50 or so for unlimited sites) easily adds the ability to copy the backup to offsite storage. Currently DropBox and Amazon Storage are available. Phil also pointed out the security feature of Akeeba to setup a secret key as attackers could trigger your backup repeatedly and cause a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. This setting is in the top right Parameters button. Akeeba Backup is even being used to non-Joomla websites.
2020Media will setup Akeeba for any customer using our hosting competely free of charge. Just ask!
WordPress Usergroup
Two talks this week - WordPress SEO and a newbies guide to Custom Post Types. The evening began with a quick roundup of WordPress news (download the podcast).
- WordPress 3.3 is almost out. New features include a drag and drop interface for adding images and other media.
- Akismet, the anti comment spam service is continuing it's march towards a paid model
- There's a plugin to check your website for vulnerability to the tomthumb problem.
- WP Install Profiles is a Drupal-like idea for developers who want to pre-fill their installs with their favourite plugins and themes.
David Bain, an internet marketing expert who uses WordPress in his work, talked about getting your WordPress website noticed in the search engines. David talked us through his 3 "P"s - Preparation, Publishing and Performance. Lots of great tips and well worth attending if you were able to get to London. His slides and our podcast will be available soon. Download the podcast
Keith Devon gave us a great introduction to Custom Post Types, which was very useful for the new developer or designer. Simply put, setting up Custom Post types allows you to add a new section to the admin menu for a adding content to a specific type of page that you design. For example if you had staff profiles, you can create a page entry that has boxes for their name, position and job description, and then on the front end display this in a particular way. Download the podcast.
Eurid Meeting
Aliette Boshier
The team for the .eu registry were in London to convince the euro-sceptics in the UK that getting a .eu domain is a good idea! Whilst the argument "show you are European" may not be terribly popular at the moment, the EU is still Britains largest overseas trading partner. If you run a business that trades with the European area, a .eu domain is a wise choice to link to your website.
The .eu domain is 5 years old this year and is now considered a well established and trustworthy domain extension. There are over 3 million .eu domains in use, and it's the 5th most popular extension in the UK (behind .uk, .com, .net and .org). .eu domains are now available from 2020Media with multi-year periods of 1 to 10 years, and were one of the first domain extensions in the world to offer a registry-backed DNSSEC (secure DNS) support.
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