Content Management Survey Results
After a solid week of activity, we’ve closed our CMS Survey. Some of the answers were predictable, but there were a few informational gems that we’ll be able to pull from this data set. We’ve summarized the results below for your edification.
To set the stage, this survey collected from 189 responses. Though I’m sure more accurate results could be gleaned from a larger group, I’m satisfied that this is enough data to indicate trends, if only for the audience of this particular site. Now, onto the results.
Which CMSs Have You Used?
WordPress is by far the most broadly used system, but there were plenty of people who either used systems not on our comparison list, or who had created there own at one point or another. I wasn’t surprised to see Expression Engine in third, since I’ve been hearing more and more about it lately.
Satisfaction
So, in general, people seem relatively satisfied with the CMS they have, though there is definitely room for improvement. I noticed in the open-ended questions area, most people, regardless of satisfaction, indicated there were things missing from their current solution. Overall, only 12% of respondants indicated any dissatisfaction with their current CMS, while 38% said they were very satisfied.
Those indicating WordPress as their favorite CMS were very near the average, with slightly fewer people indicating that they were either very satisfied or not satisfied.
Expression Engine was notable because the low level of dissatisfaction, and the high rate of ‘Very Satisfied’, even though the software costs money. However, I would attribute these results more to the licensing system than the software itself, as you would seem less likely to pay for a solution that didn’t meet your needs.
To Host or Not To Host
While I was pretty sure that many people would prefer to host their own Content Management System, I was surprised by just how many were so adamant about it.
Digging into the data a little more showed an interesting insight into the psyche of web developers.
Of all the reasons given for why respondents preferred to host their own solution, the word control was explicitly stated 51% of the time. We truly are a group of control-freaks. I could comment on this finding quite a bit, but I’ll save that for a separate article.
The Rest of the Data
There were a few open-ended questions asked at the end of the survey which don’t have any real computational value to a summary such as this. The data will, however, be used and published here as we begin to develop our own version of managing online content. Hopefully you find this data useful, or at least interesting.
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Published August 22, 2008 by:
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So far there are 24 comments.
The part I am most amazed with is that people consider Wordpress to be a Content Management System. It’s a blogging engine. It’s modeled and built around a blogging engine. It does a great job at that, but once you start needing any other data modeling – then you have to look for another solution. I guess most of these who responded were mostly designers, as the developers I have spoken with wouldn’t attempt to shoehorn proper data models of a CMS into Wordpress. Thoughts?
August 22nd, 2008
@Nate: Agreed, though plenty of people do it, and plenty of people seem happy with it. Strange but true.
August 22nd, 2008
Wait, hold one, how isn’t Wordpress a CMS? It has Content, and you manage it. That content include “blog” posts (aka articles/papers/essays, eg, content), as well as undated pages, images, comments, and users. Sure, it may not be as flexible or featured as your-favorite-CMS, but that just makes it a bad CMS, not not a CMS at all.
August 22nd, 2008
@Benjamin In the most generic sense of the term, WordPress IS a CMS. However, WordPress is a highly targeted at blogging, a small portion of managing content.
August 22nd, 2008
@Benjamin Kudria Wordpress is a blogging engine. Defining a CMS as ‘Content, and you manage it’ is very vague. My phone has content that I manage. My computer has content that I manage. My camera has content that I manage. I am talking specifically about the context of the web. All pieces of content are not modeled around a “blog” post, which is what Wordpress does very well. Think about the different pieces of content. Photo galleries (categories, tags, comments, etc), Video galleries (categories, tags, comments, etc), and Job Listings (categories, tags, comments, etc) just to name a small few. A “blog” post is just one piece of modeled content for the web. What about building custom modules with specific data modeling? No, this doesn’t mean to shoehorn it into a custom field inside of Wordpress. What about custom modules that need to maintain associations to other specified modules (basic database relationships or bindings)?
I don’t think it has anything to do with flexibility and features, and everything to do with properly modeling the data for the job. Not everything is a “blog” post or a derivative thereof.
August 22nd, 2008
Interesting but not totally surprising results. Also, I noticed that there’s a typo in the legend of the second image. (“Satified”)
August 22nd, 2008
Textpattern uses the term “Content Publishing System” which seems more apt and probably applies to Wordpress too.
August 22nd, 2008
@the previous CMS vs Blog discussion, I think that the proper term you are trying to find is “Portal” vs “Blog”, both are Web based CMS. And I think Nate is right, WP is blog targeted, but it’s also true that it works great as a “Portal” manager, for “static pages”. Maybe it is not centered in lots of different data (like Nate mentioned, photo, video, job listings) but blog posts, and pages to some extend, but that is what most basic projects need, and integrating other kinds of content with plugins is really easy.
WP is my CMS of choice for most projects, by far. Not too simple, nor too complex. Just what a small to medium project needs, as long as they don’t need a shopping cart or an advanced gallery of images or other custom data manipulation.
In the end it’s all up to the project itself, for a larger portal I would go for Joomla!, for an eCommerce site I would choose Magento, for a Community based site: Dolphin, image galleries: Gallery2 and so on. I have just discovered a small CMS called Frog, very simple and basic, could also work instead of WP.
But I must admit one of the main reasons I choose WP because I already know how to tweak it, and have the results I want. But it’s not the only thing, there’s also the community behind it, plugins, themes, help, resources… upgrading is so easy with SVN, it outputs valid code, other services integrate directly with it (feedburner for example), and a ton of other small things…
Anyhow, I’ve gone too far… good post, thanks for sharing!
August 22nd, 2008
Steve This is terrific! Thanks so much for posting these results and creating such elegant charts. One note&mdash“ExpressionEngine” is the correct spelling.
August 22nd, 2008
Nate has a right. Why people use Wordpress like a cms? It’s blogging platform. It’s not working properly with other sites than blogs.
August 23rd, 2008
But Jan, WPdoes work properly as a CMS. In fact WP is a CMS, targeted for blogging. What do you use as alternatives?
August 23rd, 2008
It great to see Drupal getting the attention is deserves, Only a matter of time before it really takes off.
August 23rd, 2008
Awesome article. I think the results are fairly predictable though. I’m a ExpressionEngine user and would agree with the scores it got. I’m very satisfied with it. Is there room for improvement? Of course. Is it leaps and bounds better (for me and my clients) than all of the other CMS systems (I don’t count WP in this category) that I’ve tried? Hell, yes.
August 23rd, 2008
Awesome article. I think the results are fairly predictable though. I’m a ExpressionEngine user and would agree with the scores it got. I’m very satisfied with it. Is there room for improvement? Of course. Is it leaps and bounds better (for me and my clients) than all of the other CMS systems (I don’t count WP in this category) that I’ve tried? Hell, yes.
August 23rd, 2008
Awesome article. I think the results are fairly predictable though. I’m a ExpressionEngine user and would agree with the scores it got. I’m very satisfied with it. Is there room for improvement? Of course. Is it leaps and bounds better (for me and my clients) than all of the other CMS systems (I don’t count WP in this category) that I’ve tried? Hell, yes.
August 23rd, 2008
Good job on the survey. I would have to agree on predictability of results though. Still not many people know about ExpressionEngine -hence the typos etc.
Coming from WordPress scene back in the days, trying to hack and constantly customizing to fit into client needs, I must admit ExpressionEngine was a big relief. For every project, you have an empty plate on hand. Whether you want an entrée or a main course or strait to dessert, it will serve you just fine.
August 23rd, 2008
Good job on the survey. I would have to agree on predictability of results though. Still not many people know about ExpressionEngine -hence the typos etc.
Coming from WordPress scene back in the days, trying to hack and constantly customizing to fit into client needs, I must admit ExpressionEngine was a big relief. For every project, you have an empty plate on hand. Whether you want an entrée or a main course or strait to dessert, it will serve you just fine.
August 23rd, 2008
Stange group, 88% has his own hosting and domain. Why they dont use blogspot?
August 25th, 2008
A very interesting survey, although the results are quite predictible. It’s always good to confirm one’s predictions, though. :)
August 27th, 2008
@Cem Meric – Have got to agree that ExpressionEngine provides so much flexibility with so little effort. I look forward to more people learning about just how great it is from anything from a blogging platform to a fuller CMS.
Great poll!
September 8th, 2008
Very Interesting results. btw nice graphic
September 8th, 2008
WP has matured to the status of CMS. For many businesses, this system gives them the power and flexibility to make changes and additions to their websites without having to call on a designer or developer. With the huge development community surrounding it, there also exist plugins for just anything you might need.
I think your definition of what constitutes a CMS is too limiting.
September 9th, 2008
“Stange group, 88% has his own hosting and domain. Why they dont use blogspot?”
Because most of use would prefer to host our own sites as opposed to betting the farm on the whims of another company. If Blogspot decided tomorrow, that no more images could be uploaded… then what?
September 12th, 2008
Can’t wait to see what you are coming up with Steve. I think there is room for a well developed CMS and asking the users questions is always a good start. Also the wood charts are sexy.
As for the WordPress as a CMS discussion that is inevitable. I’m a WordPress user, I can hack it into submission without a problem. But as I’ve grown my programming skills I’ve started seeing its limits and the benefits of a so called real CMS. I have no doubt that you can use WordPress as a CMS, but it isn’t the most eloquent solution.
September 16th, 2008