The digital agency water&stone released it's newest white paper called 2010 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. The report analyses 20 top content management systems including Alfresco WCM, CMSMadeSimple, Concrete5, DotNetNuke, Drupal, e107, eZ Publish, Joomla!, Liferay, MODx, Movable Type, OpenCMS, Plone, SilverStripe, Textpattern, Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, Typo3, Umbraco, WordPress and Xoops, focusing primarly on brand strength and market share.

The paper concludes that the big three - WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal - are still uncontested when it comes to brand strength and market share. Particularly WordPress has had a strong year and has now taken a lead in brand strength.

It is suggested that the next big thing might be either Concrete5 or Umbraco.

The water&stone whitepaper can be downloaded here: http://www.waterandstone.com/sites/default/files/2010%20OSCMS%20Report.pdf

PacktPub recently announced the winners of their annual Open Source Awards. As it reads on their homepage, "the Open Source Awards is a contest that aims to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source projects". People were able to nominate applications in the following categories (amongst others): Open Source CMS, Hall of Fame CMS and Most Promising Open Source Project.

The winners are listed below:

Open Source CMS - CMS Made Simple

Hall of Fame CMS - Wordpress

Most Promising Open Source Project - Pimcore

The development team behind CMSMS announced the release of CMS Made Simple 1.9. Although the last release was 1.8.3, major new features made it to the new release. The most important ones in my opinion are as follows:

• fully customizable URLs
• the News Module now also supports fully customizable URLs
• major MenuManager performance increase
• jQuery support

Considering that the work on CMSMS 2.0 has taken already 2 years and is still ongoing, this release got a very warm welcome from the user base.

What CMS should I use? This is a question I have asked myself many times, as I maintain several other websites besides QuantumRealms. I'm sure many of you have been puzzled by this question, too. There are so many solutions available that it makes one dizzy. How do you find the best solution for you? My suggestion: make a list!

1. What is the nature of your website?

If you are about to start a personal blog, you might find that Wordpress is the CMS for you. If, on the other hand, you plan to build a big community site, you might want to consider something more powerful like Joomla.

2. How big will your site be?

Are 10 pages enough, or will you need to publish 10.000+ pages?

3. Customization, user feedback and multiple content editors.

Would you like to customize the look and feel of your website or are would you be satisfied with the default design? Do you want to get feedback from your users? Are multiple editors going to update/write content?

If you answered all those questions, you already have a pretty good idea what you need. Check out Smashing Magazine and Webdesigner Depot for more in-depth information about the topic.