J Boye creates a recommended list of Web CMSs

The J Boye blog published a post this week called "Who Should Be on Your CMS Shortlist." The post actually creates a list of recommended vendors. There is nothing inherently wrong with calling out certain vendors based on your experience that you feel offer the best products. Boye limited the list to 10, pointing out that a recent CMS Watch report has 42 and the Gartner Magic Quadrant highlights 18.

They explain their selection criteria and why they didn't include certain vendors such as Microsoft SharePoint. Four of the vendors are purely open source including the usual suspects: Drupal and Plone. Half of the list are .Net, two are Java, two PHP and one Python. One of the vendors, Day isn't open source, per se, but it makes use of a lot of open-source components in its products.

All of this doesn't really tell you much, but it's a lot like the CMS selection process itself. You start off with a list of all possibilities, then try to find certain criteria that matches your needs. Do you absolutely need to have .NET or Java? Would you use open source? All of these factors contribute to your decisions, but you have to understand how you will build and maintain the site and test and work with these products.

But Boye is right about one big thing here, before you can get to the testing stage, you need to have a short list to work from. Whether you chose from Boye's list, the Magic Quadrant or CMS Watch is up to you. In the end, these types of lists are only marginally useful because you have to choose the system that works best for you and your organization, and no generic list is going to know your exact needs.

For more information:
- see the J Boye blog post

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