Recently I have attended the Gilbane CMS Conference in Boston.

In particular I was interested in the session about Open Source CMS's.

The panelists in that session were:

Mitch Pirtle, Founder, Joomla Project

Jay Batson, Founder and Former CEO, Acquia, Drupal Project

Scott Paley, CEO, Abstract Edge, Plone Foundation

Dr. Ian Howells, CMO, Alfresco

Moderator: Joseph Bachana, President/Founder DPCI. No representative of WordPress was present.

So, after all these people spoke out about their companies and advantages of Open Source in general, I asked them, during the Q&A session, the following: ��� So far you spoke about the commonalities of your products, but what are the differences. Where is your ���sweet spot���? How do you differentiate yourself?���

You should have see their reaction. That is exactly what I wanted. I wanted their first reaction.

First spoke the Alfresco guy. He said that the Alfresco is the leader in the Enterprise market when anyone needs Document Management/ Web Content Management System, Java based. Some people even use Alfresco as a repository and are running Joomla! On top of it. He is by the way former Documentum co-founder.

Plone guy said that Plone excels at Work Flow design, security, standards, repeatable deployments and script maintainability.

Drupal guy said that when some one needs highly customizable, non-standard site, complex, lots of plug-in modules for all occasions.

Joomla! Guy said that it is good for skinning the site ( themes), lots of template clubs, ease of use, it is originally used for Corporate communications and marketing (non-technical) departments. Simple to skin. That Joomla! has a limited feature set is a myth. Custom work is also quite possible.

After the presentation I went over to the Plone booth for a presentation of Plone, I liked what I saw.

The only reservation is that Plone is written in Python language, although it is better than PHP, it is not as popular.

During this presentation the moderator also mentioned the popularity of open source CMS based on the number of downloads, according to CMSWire:

Joomla! ��� 25%

Drupal ��� 15%

Wordpress ��� 13%

Alfresco ��� 4%

Plone ��� 3% and then the others.

I also checked the Amazon for the number of book titles for each of the following:

Drupal ��� 336

Joomla ��� 236

Wordpress -- 987

Plone ��� 256

Alfresco ��� 95

The actual numbers might be inaccurate but the ratio is more telling.

As far as porno sites are concerned, I have never heard of any preference for Joomla, it has never came up during the conference either. Sounds to me like total crap.

Eugene.