Since CMS, or content management solutions, are a pivotal part of the web development industry, I thought that I would do a year-end review of the top open-source solutions that are on the market and try to highlight some areas of advancement that took place.  One thing that was evident to me in 2009 was the core advancements that were made in many of the open-source content management community.

Not only did we see a lot of core improvements to established solutions like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, but we also saw some some emerging solutions make some big strides.  One of these solutions that my partners and i utilized this past year was MODx.

Content Management Systems in 2009

In terms of market share WordPress led the group of open-sourced content management solutions by a large margin (averaging 433,767 downloads per week).  Second on the list was Joomla (averaging 189,429 weekly downloads). Drupal was the third most popular content management solution (averaging 62,500 weekly downloads).  These figures are from CMS Wire’s 2009 report, a very interesting report if you are a web developer.  In terms of installations and evaluations, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal also topped the group.  The rankings according to adoption were flip-flopped with Drupal gaining the most ground, followed closely by Joomla and WordPress.  In terms of brand recognition and overall perception, WordPress led the pack by an impressive margin.

Advancements in Plugin Development (WordPress)

Aside from the core advancements that were made in 2009 there were also a ton of plugins released by the development community.  In the case of WordPress, the CMS that I follow the closest, I was most impressed with some of the plugin releases that addressed common needs such as e-commerce, messaging, event management, and social media.  There has also been a lot of talk about paid or premium plugins this past year.  This idea was met w/ a lot of debate inside the wordpress community.  For years everything wordpress has been readily available for free.  Personally, I have no problem with paid or premium plugins.  I think that if developers are able to actually put a price tag on their contributions that it will go a long way toward advancing the plugin options that we have available to us as developers.

Advancements in Theme Development (WordPress)

There were also some major advancements in the wordpress theme community as well.  Some leaders in that community like Brian Gardner and WooThemes really stepped up to the plate and delivered some nice foundations for us to design our client projects from.  There were also some nice multi-purpose themes like Thesis and WP-Remix that gained a lot of traction.  I reviewed the WP-Remix wordpress theme earlier this year here if you are interested.  Another neat product for theme development that I stumbled upon this past year was a WYSIWYG theme generator called Artisteer, I also reviewed their product here if you are interested.

What advancements will we see in the wordpress theme community in 2010?  Honestly I think we are going to see some major advancements, I know from following his tweets that Brian Gardner is working some pretty cool things at StudioPress.  I also think that we are going to see more solutions become available like PSD2CSS that will convert PSD Photoshop Files to WordPress themes.  I have also heard of this being approached from a Photoshop plugin perspective as well, meaning that you could export wordpress themes from WordPress.  It’s just a matter of time if you ask me, this is where it’s at.  Functionality for WordPress is already there for WordPress, design limitations are the only real constraints at this time.

Poll: What is Your Favorite CMS to Work With?

Please take a few seconds to complete the poll below and let us know what your favorite open-source content management solution is to work with.