The CMS game has just been turned up another level (NeeNorteyMedia). Drupal 7 stable was released January 5th, Joomla! 1.6 stable yesterday today. At this stage it’s time for marketing and release parties.
We hear words about the two systems like scalable, better, easier to use, more flexible, fast, responsive, revamped, … simply the best :-)
- The Drupal community celebrated 326 Drupal 7 parties in 96 countries the last days (800 photos on Flickr, Facebook Fan Page)
- The Joomla! community will party between January 14th and 16th. If you want to throw a party, add it here or visit ours and become a release party fan.
But what’s beyond these party things and behind all the buzz?
The answer is not that easy because the products itself are not easy to understand. Nobody knows the real intention of releasing both stable versions in one week after three years of work. I am not sure if the systems are ‘production ready’. But now they are born and they will mature very fast because both communities are now motivated to fix any problem.
Both new versions are born in a market where, due to w3tecs.com, 76{0f2b36d8f80fa52f37b916148a6e37fe671d96583f68d5887344addd2eee52a6} of the websites they monitor are using NO cms, 13.3{0f2b36d8f80fa52f37b916148a6e37fe671d96583f68d5887344addd2eee52a6} are using WordPress, 2.6{0f2b36d8f80fa52f37b916148a6e37fe671d96583f68d5887344addd2eee52a6} are using Joomla! and 1.4{0f2b36d8f80fa52f37b916148a6e37fe671d96583f68d5887344addd2eee52a6} are using Drupal. Remember, WordPress itself tries to avoid the term CMS. I don’t know exactly why, but I assume the acronym CMS sounds too technical for most of the users. But imagine how big this market still is!
It is now easy to setup a Joomla! or a Drupal website out of the box but what’s next? What will make it special and unique? The design? The content? The performance? The services the website is offering? The marketing? The community around the website CMS? The revamped admin interface?
What I see beside these questions is an amazing engagement in free and open source software. In a Joomla! community magazine article I read the sentence ‘Joomla! does very well as a community-driven project alongside corporate-supported WordPress and Drupal’. I agree with that but it has advantages and disadvantages to be community driven the way Joomla! was and partly is. The last year was very complicated for them because they were definitely not community driven in the sense they wanted to be. They are still in a progress of reinventing their association and their home on joomla.org, but they do well. Late but not too late they have discovered the potential of their big worldwide community and they start to act differently and much more openly compared to the last years.
Everything is a question of quality, momentum and marketing (ask Steve).
Joomla! folks, next time when you discuss about community vs. corporate driven projects and Joomla! politics – simply look at this video from your friends from Drupal. It took them very long and it was very hard to organize the Drupal Association, the relaunch of drupal.org, the organisation of two international conferences every year and much more. It was hard work for the community and for all the Drupal shops too. But they made it in an awesome way!
Have you seen these cool new Drupal features?
Joomla! has cool features too. Do you know them?
The video was produced by a company – Lullabot. You can see the logo at the left corner.
Yes, the maintainer of Drupal 7 Angie Byron works for Lullabot.
Why not use these kind of resources?
The mixture of corporate and community issues make things like this video possible!
I noticed that Joomla! community member gnumax from Brazil is creating a Joomla! video too. That’s amazing.
Gnumax is working full-time in a Joomla! shop called webempresa. Why not involve them officially!
Be sure, they know a lot about quality, momentum and marketing.
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