Features Impacting Open Source CMS Selection

In the lead up to the 2010 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, water&stone surveyed a group of users of various open source content management systems. In the survey, we asked users to evaluate the most popular open source content management systems and to share the criteria they used in the selection process. During November and December of 2010, over 5,000 people participated in the survey. Of that group, 3,365 answered the question: “When selecting a CMS, how important are the following features?” In this article, we share the insights gained from that question.

A note about the participants

• Survey participation was voluntary, without incentive.
• 79.7% of the participants in the survey were from small to medium-sized businesses (less than 100 employees).
• Many of them (84.3%) indicated that they were directly responsible for the selection of their company’s present CMS.
• Though the survey was in English, the participants came from 98 countries around the world.
• All survey participants were users of a CMS.

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As part of our attempt to understand what motivates CMS owners to select one system over another, we asked the survey participants to rate how influential various features were to their decision. We listed 10 of the most common CMS features and asked the survey participants to characterize each as one of the following:

• NOT Important
• SOMEWHAT Important, or
• VERY Important

Of the 10 features we listed, more than 2/3 of the respondents marked three of them as VERY Important to their selection process.

• According to the survey, the most important factor was Flexible User Permissions. It was named as VERY Important by 69.6% of the respondents. Only 2.3% of the group labeled this factor as NOT Important.
• The second most important criteria was the presence of an Open API. 67.4% of the group named this factor VERY Important to their decision. 4% characterized it is as NOT Important.
• The third most important factor was the system’s support for Search Engine Optimization. 65% of the respondents categorized this factor as VERY Important. Less than 5% of the group labeled it NOT Important.

Content Tagging was the fourth most influential factor, followed closely by support for a Configurable Workflow.

The top five factors were the only ones rated as SOMEWHAT Important or VERY Important by more than 90% of the survey participants.The top three features, Flexible User Permissions, Open API and Search Engine Optimization, were very influential, with responses running 2:1 in favor of VERY Important over SOMEWHAT Important. The fourth and fifth most popular features showed a much weaker impact on influence, with SOMEWHAT Important being selected as, or more, often than VERY Important.

Content Versioning came in a close sixth in terms of popularity, with 89.6% of the respondents indicating that it was SOMEWHAT Important or VERY Important.

A large gap occurs in the results between the sixth most popular and seventh most popular features. While less than 11% labelled the sixth most popular feature as NOT Important, that number jumps to over 17% for the seventh most influential feature: Social Media Integration. The results also show a significant shift in influence for this feature, with Social Media Integration labelled SOMEWHAT Important by 49%, while only 34.7% characterized it as VERY Important.

In eighth place in terms of influence is Multi-Lingual Support. While more than 20% of the participants labeled it NOT Important, almost 50% of the group said it was VERY Important. The feature is the only one in the bottom five of the survey to receive more votes for VERY Important than for SOMEWHAT Important.

The two least influential features were both labelled NOT Important by more than 20% of the survey group. In the ninth place was Multi-Site Management, with 42.4% stating it was SOMEWHAT Important and 37.6% indicating it was VERY Important. In last place was Mobile Publishing, which was labelled VERY Important by only 29.2% of the group — the lowest of any feature in the list. More than 50%, however, labeled it SOMEWHAT Important –the largest percentage of people characterizing any feature as SOMEWHAT Important.

What lessons can we take away from this?

The strong showing by the top three features in this survey show clearly that flexible user permissions, an open API and a search engine friendly system are fundamental requirements. With more than 2/3 of the survey participants naming those features as very important to their selection process we would go so far as to say that the presence of those features is essential for a system to be competitive.

Advanced content management functionality was also influential among buyers. Systems that can offer to users tagging, workflow and content versioning will find that they meet a need in the market. We think it likely that users are more aware of these functionalities than they were a few years ago and are now actively looking for for these features in systems.

The responses related to support for multi-lingual content say to us that the need for this feature is rather black and white: If you don’t need it, then it is clearly not important. On the other hand, if you do need it, then it is most certainly very important — there’s little middle ground. We also suspected that there were regional differences at work here and we went back and filtered the responses by region. When we narrowed the results to the respondents in Asia Pacific countries, we saw a significant change in the results. For AsiaPac, support for multi-lingual publishing was characterized as NOT Important by less than 10% of the respondents (compared to 20.5% for the global numbers).

The numbers for mobile publishing are interesting and can be read in multiple ways. We tend to look at the large number of people labeling it somewhat important as an indicator that it is still early days in the world of mobile content management and that people tend to think that while it would be nice to have support for this feature, it is not a requirement for their selection.

Of course, there are limitations to what we can extract from this data set. The set of 10 features listed were selected from the much larger set of features that are offered by many of today’s most popular content management systems. The decision to select this particular set of 10 features reflects our emphasis on major functionality — rather than more specialized features, like polls or forums. No doubt, however, some features not listed in the survey are very influential on at least some prospective buyers.

Additionally, we were not able to assess the level of the respondents’ awareness of extensions and the extent to which the respondents were relying on the CMS core to provide the features, rather than adding the feature into the core by means of an extension. This observation might provide an explanation for the numbers we saw relative to social media integration. With social media being such a big topic these days, we find it hard to believe that it is an unimportant factor in CMS selection. The numbers above, however, seem to indicate that it is relatively less important. We have to wonder whether people are relying on third party widgets (e.g., the Facebook “like” button) or extensions (e.g., Add This) to supply this functionality, and therefore support for social media integration in the CMS core is less important to their selection process.