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Content Management Systems Forum

Make separate lists for different things

mag2010 on 5 October 2010, 15 years ago

You have a mixture of different types of software in your list, not only CMS. WordPress and Blogger are blogging systems, Vbulletin, SMF and others are forum systems. None of them are CMS. Also, you should separate self-hosted and hosted systems. 

Sam Soltano (site administrator) on 5 October 2010, 15 years ago

It is true that we did put all CMS-like systems into one category, not only traditional full-featured CMS. We did this on purpose, and these are the two main reasons:

1. The difference between the sub-categories you mentioned (CMS, blogs, forums) tends to disappear. If you mention WordPress as a blogging system, then I would say this is certainly the core functionality of WordPress, but enough features have been added in the meantime so that many people use it in a way they would have used a more traditional CMS in the past. The same is true for advanced forum systems. All these systems evolve permanently and we found that keeping clearly distinct subcategories is impossible nowadays.
2. Many sites do consist only of a blog, and you might be surprised how many sites consist only of a forum. If this is what the webmaster needs, then a good blogging or forum software is all he needs. This is how he manages his content. We did not want to split the web up by "content type". And after all, what would we do if someone uses only the forum module of a full-featured CMS. Would that have to go into the forum category?

Your distinction hosted vs. self-hosted might be interesting indeed. You should keep in mind, however, that many of these systems come in both versions (e.g. WordPress). Furthermore, you could get a hosting plan somewhere, that comes with a pre-installed open source CMS. Would that be hosted or self-hosted? For the webmaster, there is not much difference whether this service is hosted by WordPress or by someone else. Our conclusion was: if we can't make a clear distinction between such sub-categories, then we wont separate them.

I hope this explains our line of reasoning for defining the categories the way we did.

Sean on 6 October 2010, 15 years ago

Hi Sam,

Interesting discussion. I don't get your point regarding wordpress as a hosted service. As far as I understand, you don't count the wordpress subdomains anyway. All you count is the self-hosted version of wordpress.

Sam Soltano (site administrator) on 6 October 2010, 15 years ago

Hello Sean,

We do not count sub-domains, but that doesn't mean that we never count hosted WordPress sites. If you set up your domain example.com to show the content of example.wordpress.com, then we count it, provided it ranks in the top 1 million sites. The criteria are the same than for any other site: a domain of its own and enough traffic on that domain to be counted. That is, by the way, the only way we get services such as Blogger into the CMS statistics, as this is an example of a system that cannot be self-hosted.

Marc Laporte on 26 October 2011, 14 years ago

Hi Sean and Sam,

Interesting discussion. I agree with Sam that it's very difficult to put systems into neat sub-categories. 

I think one interesting distinction would be to indicate which systems can be self-hosted and are FOSS.

Can be self-hosted: yes/no

FOSS: yes/no

These could be used as filters or just little icons (with a pop-up explanation) next to the names.

There may still be some grey zones if some systems have both a commercial and open source version of the CMS and this may not be (yet) tracked by the stats. So, a quick workaround is to indicate:

FOSS: yes/no/both

Best regards,

M ;-)

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