Content management systems are sprouting up like mushrooms after a warm April rain. If your job is to find the perfect CMS for your needs, you can spend weeks analyzing and comparing features of various CMS applications. Luckily, Ric Shreves of Water & Stone – an Indonesia-based Web development firm specializing in CMS projects – did most of the legwork for you by laying out all the pros and cons of nearly twenty most popular open-source CMS engines in his 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share report.

I was glad to see my favorite WordPress included in the review. It is about time CMS gurus acknowledge the fact that features of this impressive application grew well beyond the scope of blogging. Not surprisingly, ease of use and market penetration of WordPress assured it one of the top spots in the review. As recognition of CMS aspects of WordPress is growing, this application is likely to put a serious squeeze on the long-time CMS leaders like Joomla! and Drupal.

Critics of the reports complain that Alfresco was dropped from the rating. While Alfresco is certainly a CMS giant, the application is designed primarily as an enterprise document management solution. Because of this specialization, including Alfresco in this Web-centric CMS review would have unfairly relegated it to the category of “laggards”.

Other critics point out the fact that the most-popular CMS application is not necessarily the best one. OSS projects are developed by dedicated volunteers. The success of an OSS project is a direct function of the number and quality of programmers involved in its development. High profile projects attract more developers, leading to more features, better security, regular updates, higher quality and efficiency of code and, as the result, further increasing the project’s popularity.

Some may say that Windows and IE are still far more popular than Linux and Firefox, but they are certainly not better. True, but then Windows and IE are not open-source, and so the argument does not fly. In the world of OSS projects popularity can and often does lead to a better product.