[Evangelism] Water and Stone Open Source CMS report

[Carsten Senger]

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Hi Folks,

Water and Stone published a report about the Open Source CMS market
that features Plone. In short Plone performs well, regarding some
criteria very well, beside others Downloads, Developers, running
installations, # of sites in the search engine top 5/10 for certain
common keywords and social networks activity.

But they also list Plone in the "Cause of Concern" section because of:

* Brand strength (search engine visibility, site popularity, mindshare,
reputation).
* evaluation->usage conversion rate
* Abandonment rate - number of users that do not use Plone any
longer

Mindshare (who knows Plone), conversion rate and abandonment numbers
where taken from their own users survey with 2500 participants. The
rest are various metrics from search engines and external sites.

But see yourself, the report is available here:

http://www.waterandstone.com/book/2011-open-source-cms-market-share-report

Cheers,

..Carsten
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[Maurizio Delmonte]

Thanks for sharing Carsten!

what do you all think about the fact that, from a quick overview, we could express all the features (probably) at the base of Concrete5 success, which is the "hero" of the report? :)

Best,

Maurizio

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 6:45 PM, Carsten Senger <sen...@rehfisch.de> wrote:

But see yourself, the report is available here:

http://www.waterandstone.com/book/2011-open-source-cms-market-share-report

--

Maurizio Delmonte - [maurizio...@abstract.it]

Abstract Open Solutions [http://www.abstract.it]

Tel:  +39 081 06 08 213

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[Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.]]

Yet another 'popularity contest' report (on the heals of the PacktPub
open source awards ( http://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home ),
which is merely a vote for your favorite CMS, not any evaluation of
which CMS tools do XYZ better than the others out there.

Unfortunately, to some degree we do have to fight the popularity wars
too, but I don't see Plone ever being a popular as the
point-and-click-$5/mo-and-here-is-your-blog Wordpress generators out there.

I think that for the plone.com site and when marketing Plone in general,
we have to be sure to point out that while you certainly can use it for
the 5-10 page brochure site, it's much more powerful than that - that
numerous other CMS tools can't compare in terms of security,
scalability, fine-grained permission management, workflow, check-in/out
support, audit trail, etc., etc.

To help fight this particular PR battle (with the producers of this
report, which I believe I've seen in previous years), I suggest that we
get in contact with its author and work to get included in the process
for their next report to help them get a large enough sample size and
help fight the reports built-in bias. The author (information on last
page of report) has published PHP-based CMS books on WP, Joomla, and the
like.

Visiting Water and Stone's website, it appears all they do is churn out
Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal sites, so there is other concern for bias.
http://www.waterandstone.com/portfolio

As mentioned early on and throughout the report, there is some
self-admitted concern over their data due to the lack of marketing of
the survey within some project communities. Is that really the way to
get a well-balanced set of data? To solicit the specific CMS
communities to pine for their favorite tool? No, it isn't, but as long
as their are dolts out there who follow popularity reports when making
software selections, we need to get into the game and submit surveys
from our own community as well.

We could also ask the author to 'explain more fully' some of the metrics
represented in the report - some which seem conflicting on the surface,
such as: If there is such a low awareness of Plone by respondents (one
graphic), then how is it that so many of them are stating they are
abandoning Plone (another graphic)? And if so few have any awareness of
Plone, how is it there are so many who have evaluated it, but decided to
use something else?

In the section toward the end where Plone and Joomla are mentioned as
tools for 'concern', the author admits that a few things don't quite add
up. That while the brand reputation metric that Plone supposedly does
so poorly in is so low, it doesn't explain how it is that Plone is in
the top 4 tools for # downloads or in the top half for installs, and
other metrics they measured.

Perhaps if they attempted to have survey respondents who were outside of
their own client base who seem to mostly use WP/Drupal/Joomla, they'd
see more accurate results. Then again, I'm not convinced this report
attempts to get accurate results. But at least it's something for the
web manager dipping their toes into the open source CMS market where
there are only so many good evaluation reports freely available, like
this one.

Cheers all,

Ken

[Dylan Jay]

One of the stats we use in presentation promoting plone is from w3techs.

http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-plone/all/all

The market position shows that Plone is more popular than both
wordpress and joomla for high traffic sites, and almost as popular as
drupal.

The methodology this use is outlined on http://w3techs.com/technologies/topsite/content_management
Note there are some pretty expensive and largely unpopular systems in
that list so overall Plone is bucking the trend.

---
Dylan Jay
Technical Solutions Manager
PretaWeb: Multisite Performance Support
P: +612 80819071 | M: +61421477460 | twitter.com/djay75 | linkedin.com/
in/djay75

[Jan Ulrich Hasecke]

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Am 30.11.11 02:07, schrieb Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.]:

> Yet another 'popularity contest' report (on the heals of the
> PacktPub open source awards (
> http://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home ), which is merely
> a vote for your favorite CMS, not any evaluation of which CMS tools
> do XYZ better than the others out there.
>
> Unfortunately, to some degree we do have to fight the popularity
> wars too, but I don't see Plone ever being a popular as the
> point-and-click-$5/mo-and-here-is-your-blog Wordpress generators
> out there.

If you use this as an excuse that Plone isn't easy to install,
maintain and use, you will fail. I think that we should also address
the point-and-click generation. Plone suits well for five-page
websites and for five million-page websites.

juh

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[T Kim Nguyen]

I thnk ploud.com is a very good answer to this point-and-click group's needs.

One of the things Guy Heckman and I started creating at PSE11 was virtual appliances that had Plone ready to go. We got bogged down with some problems in VirtualBox, but the idea was to get that and VMWare versions up where people could try them. But ploud.com is even simpler.

Kim

--
Sent from my iPad

[Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.]]

Yes, the concept of ploud.com could offer this type of pain-free,
hit-the-ground-running experience with Plone (especially if it included
a demo that covered more of what you could do with Plone, now that you
have a Plone site. A 'Getting Started' tutorial of some sort.)

But the problem is most of the world hasn't even heard of Plone, much
less Ploud.

90% or more of the larger hosting companies, even open source-focused
hosting companies only provide a cPanel or Plesk install via
single-click of Wordpress, Joomla, or some other PHP-based system that
runs on the more typical LAMP stack they've been hosting for years:
Apache with PHP and MySQL.

IMHO, if we really care to fight the single-click website-in-a-night
crowd, we need to start heavily pitching the GoDaddy's of the world to
offer Plone through their $10/mo Plesk/cPanel sign-up configuration process.

I think this is how most Wordpress sites get started up and not through
novices downloading/installing/hosting on their own. If we are able to
get large hosting companies to give Plone a chance on their cPanel/Plesk
setups, Plone could take advantage of much larger mind share, exposure,
awareness, and hopefully adoption.

Just putting it there, though, isn't going to do the job. We might see
the 'fiddler' who wants to try out a bunch of systems give Plone a try,
or those who specifically were seeking out a Ploud-like solution giving
it a try, but I still think the main problem is we need to create the
demand still, and that comes from marketing, from blogging, from reviews
by analysts and everyday webmasters. If people hear good things about
it or see a great site that's using it, they get curious and want to try
it out. Just adding another checkbox along side Wordpress, Joomla,
Xoops and the like when people sign-up for $10/mo hosting just still
isn't enough.

I won't even take on the hurdle of convincing larger hosting companies
that they can host Plone as resource/cost-effectively as PHP-based tools
or that going through all the hoops of supporting the necessary
Zope/lxml/PIL dependencies will be worthwhile for their business, when
people aren't clamoring for it.

Hate to be Debbie Downer - just pointing out the obvious barriers. That
doesn't mean we can't overcome them, but it won't be easy. I'd love to
see widely available single-click shared hosting mass-appeal options for
Plone hosting and it'd be really helpful in terms of lowering the bar
for getting people started.

Just as the Marketing team started 2-3 years ago to make a concerted
effort to have Plone represented at the more popular CMS industry
conferences, perhaps it's time to focus on approaching some of the
larger hosting companies to offer Plone to new shared hosting customers.

Thoughts?

Ken