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Open Source CMS Market: Lights Beyond LAMP

The web content management space is not homogeneous. And while the recently released Open Source CMS Market Share Report clearly highlighted the ongoing dominance of LAMP-based content management systems — these systems are not the only game in town.

In this article I look at brand leaders who have chosen to build their content management software on the Java or .NET technology stacks. Systems with strong brand awareness and adoption rates include Alfresco, Jahia, Liferay and OpenCMS on the Java side, and DotNetNuke and Umbraco from the .NET camp.

Looking Beyond LAMP

The LAMP stack is populist in nature. Not only does the stack carry the cost advantages of open source, but there also exists a wide assortment of low-cost hosting and a ready (and growing) supply of developers. These characteristics create low barriers for entry and an attractive choice for individuals, hobbyists and small to medium sized enterprises.

While few would dispute that there are numerically more deployments of the common LAMP stack systems, it would be a mistake to assume that this is the only platform that matters.

LAMP Systems Often Fail to Meet More Sophisticated Needs

The web content management space is not homogeneous. A hobbyist building a personal site, a small company building an online marketing presence, and a medium sized enterprise building a portal for customer relationship management are just three examples of widely disparate, yet common uses.

PHP Systems Not Often on Enterprise Short Lists

For clients who demand more functionality, higher security and more robust platforms, Java-based and .NET-based content management systems hold a strong attraction. Indeed, in the enterprise space, those platforms are more likely to be the first choice.

Though it is certain that The Big Three — Joomla!, WordPress and Drupal — continue to improve their offerings and are more capable of supporting robust websites, I think it is fair to state that at this point in time few enterprise clients put them on their shortlist.

A Vibrant Java CMS Race

We included 4 Java-based systems in the survey: Alfresco, Jahia, Liferay and OpenCMS. Of the four, Alfresco topped the set in virtually all the metrics we looked at — in many cases ranking closely behind The Big Three PHP systems. It was a very strong showing for a system that is not normally thought of in the context of web content management (Alfresco primarily markets itself as a document management, Enterprise CMS or records management solution).

Liferay Demonstrates Brand Strength and Social Media Prominence

Alfresco had a strong lead over the other systems in brand recognition and brand familiarity ratings. While Alfresco lead Liferay in many metrics, it did not do so across the board; Liferay also performed very well. Liferay showed significantly greater strength in third party support, website popularity metrics and social media prominence.

Both Alfresco and Liferay ranked highly in the brand sentiment metrics, with Alfresco coming in third overall in 2009 survey — one of the clear leaders in this key metric. Liferay was not far behind, coming in sixth overall.

OpenCMS and Jahia Present but Lagging

Alfresco and Liferay lead OpenCms by a large margin in almost all categories and Jahia not only lagged relative to the other Java based systems, but was one of the weakest performers of the entire survey group. Most troubling for Jahia has to be the brand sentiment data which showed Jahia fourth from last in the survey set, with negative sentiment running very close to 50%.

In sum, from my perspective those interested in implementing Java-based open source content management systems for their web sites have a lot to cheer about. There exist several viable choices and at least two strong, growing players. This is a space that is set to grow and remain competitive in both the short and medium terms.

Lonely .NET Players Waving the FOSS Flag

.NET is not a platform most people traditionally associate with open source, but over the last couple of years that has begun to change. A large part of that credit has to go to the DotNetNuke team, who have been waving the open source flag and investing heavily in marketing that message.

Perhaps no other system in the survey has shown a more concerted marketing effort than DotNetNuke. That marketing has paid off in brand recognition and has opened the door for .NET as an open source alternative in the minds of many consumers.

DotNetNuke Far Ahead Yet Facing Challenges

This year’s survey found that DotNetNuke leads the .NET open source CMS race over the nearest rival, Umbraco, by a significant margin. However, the good news for DotNetNuke seems to stop right about there.

Our survey found an ongoing deterioration in DotNetNuke market interest; a slide that has continued across the last several years. The system also had one of the worst ratios of trial usage to actual usage. In other words, while they were successful in getting prospects to try the system, they were less successfully in converting them into actual users. Most troubling of all were the numbers relating to brand sentiment.

DotNetNuke finished last of the entire survey set in brand sentiment and was one of only two systems to show more negative than positive responses to the question “What is your general feeling about these companies or projects?”

Further corroboration of this conclusion can be found at the Windows Web App Gallery which lists user rankings for four .NET-based content management systems. Of the four, DotNetNuke is ranked the lowest, lagging behind Umbraco, mojoPortal and Kentico CMS.

Team Umbraco Gathering Strength

Aside from the brand sentiment metric, DotNetNuke lead Umbraco across the board. However, when you look at the trend in interest levels, there is a sharp contrast: Interest in Umbraco is strengthening. The improvement is slow but steady and the gap between the two systems seems to have closed significantly in the last 12 months. One has to wonder what would happen if Umbraco could match the marketing might of DotNetNuke.

In conclusion, the .NET-based open source CMS market is still wide open. DotNetNuke was certainly the early mover but seems struggling now to hold on to that advantage. The arrival of competing systems like Umbraco, and even more recently mojoPortal, shows that there is plenty of room for competition in this space, and that things are only going to get more challenging for DotNetNuke.

The data underlying these conclusions can be found in the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, from water&stone and CMSWire. Download a free copy of the report at: http://www.cmswire.com/downloads/cms-market-share/.

About the Author

Ric Shreves is a partner at water&stone, a digital agency specializing in open source solutions. He was the lead analyst on both the 2008 and 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Reports. He can be reached at www.waterandstone.com.

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Open-Source clinic management software in Hong Kong #opensource #healthcare

[From: http://www.isia.org.hk/]
Aug 2009, After two years of development, the TaoYuan Project team formed by ISIA and HKMA are pleased to announce that CMS 3.0 is born! The CMS 3.0 is the first Open-Source clinic management software in Hong Kong. The latest version 3.1 is available now for all registered doctors and clinics to download together with online e-learning and user manual. ISIA members provide various customized CMS service packages bundling hardware, broadband, data migration, training & hotline support.
For details, _http://cms3.isia.org.hk
_

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Joomla! Performance Tips

The struggle for optimal site performance is a battle all web designers & site owners face from time to time. You see a lot of sites on the web that load slowly or perform poorly. While some sites have hosting issues, most are simply built without performance in mind. Joomla!, in and of itself, is neutral in terms of site performance; it's how you configure it and what you do with it that creates -- or prevents -- solid site performance.

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Display RSS Feed in OpenCms Template

Since this is a very common feature for many websites, here's a useful snippet I usually use when displaying RSS feeds in an OpenCms template. For example you want to display an Atom RSS feed from a WordPress blog on your OpenCms based website.

My approach is usually:
The OpenCms schema has a OpenCmsString input field (named BlogRssUrl in my case), which is mapped to the property BlogRssUrl as well.

<xsd:complexType name="OpenCmsMySchema">
  ...
  <xsd:element name="BlogRssUrl" type="OpenCmsString" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" />
  ...
</xsd:complexType>

<mappings>
    <mapping element="BlogRssUrl" mapto="property:BlogRssUrl" />
</mappings>

For fetching the RSS feed, I recommend the ROME Fetcher subproject library at https://rome.dev.java.net/, which only depends on the JDOM parser (jdom.jar). So you will end up deploying three additional jars:

• jdom.jar
• rome-1.0RC2.jar (or newer version)
• rome-fetcher-0.9.jar (or newer version)

Below is the scriplet then for the OpenCms jsp template:

<%@ taglib prefix="cms" uri="http://www.opencms.org/taglib/cms" %>
<%@ page session="false" import="org.opencms.jsp.*,java.util.*,org.opencms.file.*,java.net.URL,com.sun.syndication.feed.synd.*,com.sun.syndication.fetcher.*,com.sun.syndication.fetcher.impl.*" %>
<%  
    CmsJspActionElement cms = new CmsJspActionElement(pageContext, request, response);
    String filename = cms.getRequestContext().getUri();

           // === RSS Feed Fetching ===
    FeedFetcherCache feedInfoCache = HashMapFeedInfoCache.getInstance();
    FeedFetcher feedFetcher = new HttpURLFeedFetcher(feedInfoCache);
    CmsObject cmso = cms.getCmsObject();
    String blogRssUrl = cmso.readProperty(filename, "BlogRssUrl");
    SyndFeed feed = null;
    if (blogRssUrl!=null && !"".equals(blogRssUrl)) feed = feedFetcher.retrieveFeed(new URL(blogRssUrl));
%>

and then display the output on the page:

<% if (feed!=null) { %>
<ul>
<%
// === RSS feed output ===
for (Iterator<SyndEntry> iter= feed.getEntries().iterator(); iter.hasNext();) {
    SyndEntry entry = iter.next();
    %>               
    <li>[a href="<%=entry.getUri()%>"]<%=entry.getTitle()%>[/a]</li>                               
    <%               
}
%>
</ul>
<% } %>

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OpenCms Introduction Video

I recorded an OpenCms introduction video last weekend using Movie Maker and CamStudio (both free and easy-to-use tools), but still trying to improve the quality. 

This is my very first video recording and cutting, so please be considerate ;) 
Planning to add more videos step by step later. Hope to encourage others to do the same (on complementary topics).

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Photo album (SmoothGallery) add-on for OpenCms

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OpenCms-Spring Integration

In recent projects we have used the Spring MVC integrated into OpenCms. This topic is not new to the OpenCms community, as it has already been covered a
little in the OpenCms wiki and also Bearingpoint provides an open source submodule in their Commons-Project at Sourceforge.
 
Nevertheless, we make our small 'getting-started' project available now - it's aimed for developers who want to integrate Spring & Hibernate into
OpenCms for the first time and would like to have a ready-to-go starting point/project setup.
The project includes Eclipse and NetBeans project files as well as the ant build file. We used it for OpenCms7.0.5 and OpenCms7.5. With these OpenCms versions, the versions of the depending lib files used by Spring and OpenCms should not
conflict. (We didn't use it with OpenCms6 yet).
 
SVN:
http://svn.sysvision.net:9027/svn/com.sysvision.opencms.spring/
User: anon, Password: anon
 
or download as zip from:
http://www.sysvision.de/en/expertise/cms/solutions/opencms_spring_integration.html
 
The project contains a Readme.pdf how to use it. We hope it's useful to someone and are open for any comments, suggestions and improvements.
 
(A note regarding Hibernate: we don't use the OpenSessionInViewPattern (OSIV), so you won't find it in the project. If you want/need it, you will
find infos about it in the opencms-wiki.org)

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OpenCms: Fix for Alkacon OAMP Formgenerator, CSV Export

When exporting the Formgenerator data to CSV, there might be some problems with exporting numbers and trailing zeros when opening the file in Excel. I.e. if you have a column with zip codes and some values start with 0, they will get lost in Excel. Also, when exporting large numbers, Excel usually displays them withe the +E syntax.
 
To avoid it, the csv should escape such numbers with a = in front of it, i.e.the CSV should read:
,="07635",
 
We modified the class com.alkacon.opencms.formgenerator.database.export.CmsCvsExportBean.java, method escapeExcelCsv: checking if the value can be parsed as Double or Long, if so, put an = in front of the escaped value.
(The = cannot be put in front of all types of fields; if put in front of an escaped string value that contains commas, it will break the format; so we
really need to check if it's a number value).

    /** 
     * Escapes CSV values for excel.<p> 
     * 
     * @param value the value to escape 
     * 
     * @return the escaped excel value. 
     */
    private String escapeExcelCsv(final String value) {
        // Begin: SYSVISION modification
        boolean isNumber=false;
        try {Long.valueOf(value);isNumber=true;} catch (Exception e) {};
        try {Double.valueOf(value);isNumber=true;} catch (Exception e) {};
        // End: SYSVISION modification

        String result = value;
        StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
        buffer.append("\"");
        char[] chars = value.toCharArray();
        for (int i = 0; i < chars.length; i++) {
            // escape double quote escape delimiter within value: 
            if ('"' == chars[i]) {
                buffer.append("\"");
            }
            buffer.append(chars[i]);
        }
        buffer.append("\"");
        result = buffer.toString();
        return (isNumber?"=":"") + result;  // SYSVISION modification
    }

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