CMS

On the heals of our recently released survey that looked at foundations and their websites, I spoke with one of our clients, John Theodore, a Technology Officer at the Annenberg Foundation, about their choice to go with Drupal for their website redesign. The Annenberg Foundation, founded in 1989, provides funding and support to nonprofit organizations in the United States and globally. They have a number of web properties that serve different aims and programs. The Foundation decided to begin migrating their web properties from a variety of mostly proprietary or home-grown systems to Drupal in 2010. The work is ongoing and CivicActions is working with the Foundation on the project.

Why Open Source?

John admitted to something of a bias against proprietary systems based on the Foundation's experiences as well as his own personal history as a developer and vendor. Proprietary systems often don't communicate well with each other and thus become their own silos. Vendor and support options are also more limited for proprietary systems.

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Last month while conducting research for an upcoming report on Foundations and their use of Twitter, we started looking at what Content Management Systems (CMS) were running Foundations' websites. Our curiosity lead us to look at the top 885 Foundations with websites (based on endowment size), utilizing the Wappalyzer browser plug-in to determine how the sites were built and what technologies and services were in use.

A note on methodology: the list of Foundations and their website URLs came from the Glass Pockets transparency database. We used Wappalyzer during the month of December 2010 and looked only at the home page of Foundation. We were able to clearly identify the technology powering 478 of the 885 Foundation websites (54%).

Highlights

Here are some highlights from the tables below:

When we look at all the Foundations in our sample, Drupal is the front-runner among open source systems, but not by much. Wordpress trails in second, and just over half as many sites are running Joomla compared to Drupal. Most surprising to us is how few Foundation sites (just five) are running Plone.

When we look at the largest 500 Foundations, Drupal has double the Wordpress instances, and Joomla is right on the heels of Wordpress with just 3 fewer sites. In both samples, the proprietary web framework ASP.net powers the highest number of sites, however the lead is significantly smaller in the top 500 Foundation sample. Similarly, Dreamweaver drops from 10.51% of the full sample, remaining ahead of all the open source CMSs, to just 5% in the top 500 sample, a few points behind Drupal at 7.6%.

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It is generally recognized that CMSes are about separating the content from it's appearance and the logic that manipulates the content. In Drupal, it is good practice to maintain code in files which can be version-controlled (with subversion for example), and keep just the dynamic content and data in the database. In other words, executable code should not go in the database.

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Recently, NTEN (the Nonprofit Technology Network) released their 2008 Content Management Systems Satisfaction Report evaluating the most commonly used systems at small and medium sized organizations. The CMS systems were evaluated in five categories: Quality, Support, Delivers on Promises, Usability and Value. Drupal and Joomla! both scored the highest marks, yet Drupal had nearly twice the number of responses than the latter. Open source systems scored generally higher than commercial systems and custom systems were rated near the bottom of the pack. Kieran posted a nice summary of the report results at Drupal.org. The report is available to members of NTEN for free and to non-members at a discount rate. (CivicActions is a proud member of NTEN!)