Opinion

CMS Trends

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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.

content management systems
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
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
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.

Opinion

Building WordPress sites?

Code Poet is a resource for anyone building sites with WordPress

codepoet-logoNo matter whether you freelance on a solo basis, lead a small web shop, make plugins in a dark closet, or crack the whip at a large design firm, the aim of Code Poet is to become your go-to source of information and resources to help you expand your WordPress skills and know-how. To make you better at what you do. To make it easier to make your living and look great doing it.

How well do you know WordPress? Take the Code Poet quiz and figure out where you rank.

Technical

CiviCRM London meetup April 2013

It’s London Meetup time again next Wednesday 24th April. Do come along! Registration and more info here: http://civicrm.org/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=293

Here’s the agenda so far:

  • Welcome & introductions – Dave Melkman
  • First Session – CiviMail – Jamie Novick
  • Second Seesion – Surveys using webform & CiviMail – Owen (LLR)
  • Break (15 mins)
  • Third session – CiviCRM on a shoestring – Implementation with tiny budgets – George Steven (LMS)
  • Fourth Session – Community update – TBC
  • Fifth Session – CiviBooking – Jamie Novick
  • CiviCRM Open Workshop

What is CiviCRM? Find out here

Opinion

Joomla User Group April 2013

joomladayA 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:

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.

Opinion

Joomla Meetup March

Gary Barclay of  www.turnedontotech.co.uk gave us news of the Joomla user group meeting on 19th March.

We started off with a follow up to the security conversation from February. Joe and Phil from softforge.co.uk had laid a trap for a hacker who’d managed to implant a malicious file on a out of date Joomla site. They modified his file so that they could trace what actions he was taking. The feeling of having control over the hacker, even after the effect, was a very nice indeed!

The next item was a preview of Joomla 3.1 beta. The main topic was Tags. This led onto a discussion about keeping urls the way you want them. After this came  Zoo shopping cart options with YooDocs and Zoolanders.

Finally the floor was opened to general discussion and many Joomla problems were raised and then dispatched with the usual expertise from those present.

 

 

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