First – I know my mom and other folks who are not as tech savvy as others will probably read this – so I’ll answer their question first – what’s a CMS? Well, CMS stands for Content Management System – basically – it’s software to help people manage their content for their websites. I imagine many people reading this will already know that though.
So – now that we’ve gotten that question out of the way…there are many (MANY) Content Management Systems out there. I’m wondering – what are the most popular systems currently on the market?
There are folks in the WordPress community that claim we power >16% of the web. We first heard this stat in 2011. We’re avid fans of both WordPress and Drupal – so we are wondering – is this really true? It turns out – yes – it’s pretty true.
But is this the case for arts organizations and nonprofits? We decided to do some research for ourselves. We took a random sampling of 500 museums and worked to find out what CMS they were using to power their home site.
Here’s what we’ve found so far
More than 10% (55) of the 508 sites we sampled are running WordPress, and 46 (just less than 10%) are running Drupal. All in all, over 20% of museum sites are running open source code. And it looks like WordPress is indeed the most popular open source CMS currently around. While I have not (yet) surveyed every museum and nonprofit out there, this is a good start and I guess is indicative of what we’re looking at.
Here’s a chart of our preliminary findings.
Some stats from WordPress
Why are we bothering with this research?
Well – for starters – we build websites. So, in some ways, it’s a little bit of market research.
Second – because we can 
Who said research wasn’t fun? We’re curious and we want to know how organizations are managing all their incredible content.
Finally – it reinforces our belief that open source is the way to go (only a handful of folks are using Sharepoint, by Microsoft).
REQUESTS
We’ve got a few requests :
1. If you’d like to participate in this survey, add your data, or share how your organization is managing your web presence…well…there’s a survey for that
2. If your org uses WordPress and you’ve already completed that first survey, do this survey instead
Share Your Data3. And of course, if you have nice infographics skillz – hit us up! We intend to open up this data soon, and want to make the data look pretty.
4. Leave a comment if you want to get updates on this project or help out in any way.
Happy web making everyone!
