Content Management is a very popular category in the open source ecosystem. There are more than 2’000 open source technologies out there to handle, manage and distribute content. So why would we need any of the 200 new ones published over the last six months?

Some of the existing 2′000+ solutions are very well known. The most popular and most widely used technologies include: Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal, eZ publish, MediaWiki, openCMS, Plone, Typo3, WordPress and XOOPS. They all have in common that they are being downloaded 1’000 plus times per day, have gathered substantial communities, exist since 5-10 years (exception is “newcomer” Alfresco with only 3 years of existence). You could say there’s no reason to look further. These offerings cover all what an enterprise might need in terms of content management, if one can’t do the job the other will.

So what’s the use for the other 1’990+ solutions and frameworks? And why have open source communities and contributors added more than 200 additional open source content management technologies during the last 6 months? It will certainly not be easy for them to be successful in the already crowded market. They don’t differentiate very much on technology (more than 70% are based on PHP) and they follow common standards for licensing (more than 80% are GPL). They have been created by small and very small communities (more than 80% of the new open source cms have less than three contributors) and their biggest differentiator may be their creative names such as Moon Dragon CMS, Yanel, Luftguitar CMS, Adapt CMS Lite, Yanel or Utopia CMS. Creativity allone will though not make them a winner.

What would we expect from new content management system? We want omponentized platforms, modularized functionalities, aherence to open standard, sophisticated and easy-to-use inline editing, support for state of the art web technologies (such as Ajax, Flash, multi-media), syndication and widgets and a service oriented access. And solutions should be configurable but still easy to handle and manage. That’s probably more than what small 1-2 person team can build in a few weeks. So let’s stick with the top players again who aren’t fully able to cover these things neither? Maybe not, or at least not always.

What is nice in open source is that users can evaluate technologies and pick the one that supports their specific needs the best. In many cases this can be a fairly specialized application and often only a limited scope of functionalities is needed. New entrants have the opportunity to come with advanced architecture concepts, lightweight implementation approaches and state of the art integration of the latest standards. So why not look again at some of the newer technologies? And who knows maybe in a couple of years Luftguitar CMS, Yanel or any other of the new kids on the block from now will be found in enterprise application stacks as often as Alfresco or Drupal today.

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