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How does Tiki compare to the other fine systems out there?
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CMS Landscape

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Introduction

How does TikiWiki compare to the hundreds (external link) of Open Source CMS Systems (external link)?

People often ask us this. Ideally, to answer this question we'd need people with intimate knowledge of several systems. This tends to be pretty rare because once you get to know a versatile tool like Drupal, Joomla!, Plone or TikiWiki CMS/Groupware you can pretty much do everything you need with it (or you can certainly bend it to your needs). "He who works with a hammer thinks everything is a nail" (external link).

The other frequent question is "Which one is better?". Really the answer is "it depends" on what you are trying to do. However, with the wiki-powered collective intelligence we should be able to get some better, more detailed answers. ;)

You'll also be interested in SMACKDOWN :: Who are the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) market leaders in 2008? (external link) which comments on the comprehensive 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share Survey (external link). This survey outlines well the challenges of trying to measure popularity by number of downloads or number of installs. This could, of course, be very interesting, but how do you count the number of installs behind the corporate firewalls? Also, many applications offer each module/feature/extension/language pack/theme as a separate download (where as TikiWiki bundles everything in one large download). So to be more accurate, you'd have to try to measure the number of "core" downloads, adding complexity and subjectiveness.

Notwithstanding these challenges, this chart below has an angle of comparing activity level / size of the community which is just one thing to look at. It is not a side-by-side comparison of features (which would be nice if done like www.wikimatrix.org (external link)). It is also a way for the TikiWiki community to identifies area to improve upon.

TikiWiki strives to be the best possible system and yet still be installable on cheap shared LAMP (external link) hosting. However, it has many features from so called enterprise systems. TikiWiki is somewhat a strange animal as it shares the Corporate Wiki (external link) space with TWiki, shares the CMS (external link) space with Typo3 and shares the groupware (external link) space with egroupware.

What is the future of a wiki-centric system? see for yourself! (external link)

Comparison chart

Criteria TikiWiki CMS/Groupware Joomla! (external link) Drupal (external link) Plone (external link) Typo3 (external link) ImpressCMS (external link) (Xoops fork) Xoops (external link) eZpublish (external link) WordPress (external link) e107 (external link) DotNetNuke (external link) SPIP (external link)
Number of commiters 155 (external link) 48 (external link) 19 (external link)/1216 (external link) 267 (external link) 33 (external link) 33 (external link) 7 (external link) 84 (external link) 17 (external link) 18 (external link) ? (external link) 22 (external link)
Ohloh stacks (external link) 39 (external link) 169 (external link) 227 (external link) 97 (external link) 63 (external link) 23 (external link) 25 (external link) 31 (external link) 317 (external link) 8 (external link) 7 (external link) 15 (external link)
IRC chat room size (freenode) 32 80 248 132 40 5 (must use something else) 2 (must use something else) 18 141 27 0 (must use something else) 35
Facebook group 152 (external link) 1628 (external link) 1755 (external link) 271 (external link) 213 (external link) 54 (external link) 89 (external link) 88 (external link) 1484 (external link) 35 (external link) 195 (external link) 103 (external link)
CIA activity (October 2008) 439 (external link) 599 (external link) 839 (external link) 414 (external link)
SSC toolbox 12 (external link) 25 (external link) 81 (external link) 28 (external link) 2 (external link) 2 (external link) 0 (external link) 0 (external link) 79 (external link) 0 (external link) 0 (external link) 1 (external link)
Freshmeat Rating / Popularity (external link) 8.70/10 (134) / 21.48% (45) (external link) 8.83/10 (N/A) / 2.44% (1994) (external link) 8.41/10 (317) / 8.38% (317) (external link) 8.07/10 (367) / 7.38% (380) (external link) 8.58/10 (239) / 5.47% (598) (external link) 8.62/10 (N/A) / 0.17% (26765) (external link) 8.26/10 (N/A) / 2.75% (1691) (external link) 7.97/10 (371) / 13.70% (113) (external link) 8.72/10 (N/A) / 7.31% (385) (external link) 8.65/10 (N/A) / 1.12% (5062) 8.89/10 (N/A) / 1.40% (3932) (external link)
SourceForge activity level click (external link) click (external link) click (external link) click (external link) click (external link)
LOCs Over 1 million
Downloads 6000-9000/month (external link) 1000/month
Criteria TikiWiki CMS/Groupware Joomla! Drupal Plone Typo3 ImpressCMS (Xoops fork) Xoops eZpublish WordPress e107 DotNetNuke SPIP
Installs tens of thousands (external link) millions new project
Printed documentation 960 pages (external link) 41 books in print 19 books in print 7 book in print 17 book new project 8 books in print
Started 2002 2008
Events small many huge yes not yet many (external link)
License LGPL GPL GPL GPL GPL GPL GPL GPL & proprietary (external link) GPL GPL BSD-style GPL
Community project or Open-sourced by a company Community Community (external link) Community Community Community Community Community eZ Systems (external link) Automattic (external link) Community DotNetNuke Corporation (external link) Community
Language PHP PHP PHP Python PHP PHP PHP PHP PHP PHP ASP PHP
Coding style Simple with community coding as a design choice Object-oriented Object-oriented
Template engine Smarty Smarty Smarty
Other applied for openID bounty (external link) in Oct 2007 awaiting verdict awarded openID bounty (external link) awarded openID bounty (external link) awarded openID bounty (external link)
2007 EContent 100 List (external link) yes no yes yes yes no no yes yes no no no
2008 EContent 100 List (external link) no yes yes yes no no no no yes no no no
GSOC 2008 (external link) no yes yes yes no no no no yes no no no
GSOC 2009 (external link) yes yes yes yes yes no no no yes no no no
Fantastico shared hosting (external link) yes yes yes no yes no yes no yes no no no
Included in 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share Survey (external link) yes yes yes yes yes no yes yes yes yes no yes
Alexa (external link) 45,761 4,319 (external link) 7,913 (external link) 63,091 (external link) 121,438 (external link) 47,272 (external link) 70,678 (external link) 55,900 (external link) 3,275 (external link) 41,536 (external link) 44,196 (external link) 145,261 (external link)
Eats own's dogfood as a wiki? (external link) yes uses MediaWiki (external link) Added to Plone 3 (external link) uses MediaWiki (external link) uses MediaWiki (external link) integrated MediaWiki (external link) uses MediaWiki (external link) uses MediaWiki (external link)
Eats own's dogfood as a bug tracker? (external link) yes uses GForge (external link) yes (external link) uses Trac (external link) uses Mantis (external link) uses SourceForge.net (external link) uses SourceForge.net for core (external link) and XOOPS Module Development Forge for modules yes (external link) uses Trac (external link) yes (external link) uses Trac (external link)


This chart highlights some of the differences with other projects.

Opinions

Dries Buytaert, from Drupal wrote:
predicts: "However, near the end of 2008, we'll see the first signs of consolidation in the Open Source CMS market. The Open Source CMS space will become less fragmented; the "big three" (i.e. Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal) will continue to grow but the growth of many other systems (i.e. Plone, Typo3, Xoops, e107, ezPublish, dotNetNuke, etc) will slow down significantly." (external link)


marclaporte wrote:
1- I see the landscape as more of a "big 4" which includes Plone. If I had to limit to three (and there is no reason to do so), I'd put WordPress with the more specialized systems like MediaWiki. However, with all the plugins, you can do quite a bit with WordPress, thus it fits as a CMS. On the other end, Plone has higher entry level (hosting requirements, etc.) than PHP systems but nonetheless has a huge & active developer community (external link).

2- I don't see why the great success of the top systems would have such an effect on all other systems (certainly not in absolute terms). History may show that rapid growth by the leading systems grew the field for all and in fact, accelerated the development of the others (again, in absolute terms).

Similarly, the success of Wikipedia/Mediawiki has been a great thing for TikiWiki and for other wiki engines like DokuWiki, MoinMoin, Twiki, xwiki, etc. because it has brought wikis to the masses. When systems like Drupal/Joomla!/Wordpress get coverage in the mass media, it increases the space. I think the overall usage of Open Source Applications is growing and it is not about to slow down!

My prediction is that TikiWiki will continue improving in user base, functionality and stability very much like it has over the last 5 years. Even if Drupal and Joomla! are overall several times larger, TikiWiki is one of the largest open-source teams in the world and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Ohloh (external link). This is more than enough to sustain a great community, improve the application and to benefit from the Network effect (external link).

So go! go! go! Drupal, Joomla!, MediaWiki, etc. :-)


General CMS systems


Big 4

In general, with focus on size of the community
  • Drupal
  • Joomla!
  • Plone? (Python)
  • Wordpress (It's a debate if WordPress should be listed here. It's not a full-fledged CMS but as you can do quite a bit with all the plugins and as it has a huge install base, we'll leave it here for now)

2nd tier

In general with focus on size of the community

Who else is in 2nd tier?


Specialized

These are very popular projects but are typically single focus.
  • Moodle
  • phpBB
  • Bugzilla
  • dotproject
  • Pligg
  • Elgg
  • etc


Wikis

Wiki Landscape

Other notes


Lists



GV: My suggestions will be written in red


Todo

  1. Find cleaner way to maintain data
    • web services?
    • Nicer table/chart
      • Double click editing?
      • Sorting
      • Swap X & Y axis
      • Perhaps a tracker
  2. Split into 4 charts (with TW stats contained in a all)
    • Big 3/4
    • Other popular CMSs (low hosting requirements)
    • Other wikis Wiki Landscape
    • Other popular Web applications (high hosting requirements)


More Stats

Contributors to this page: marclaporte14331 points  , MatWho1598 points  , adren15 points  , amette226 points  and CoolOs63 points  .
Page last modified on Monday 23 March 2009 12:08:01 CET by marclaporte14331 points .

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redsoul5 points , 15:58 CET, Thu 28 May 2009: Hi, everybody! I am a chinese,.I was bulding up my owe website whit tikiwiki, and it seems too complicated for me to master it in short time. See my website www.zbzcr.com,
redsoul5 points , 15:40 CET, Thu 28 May 2009: hi~~
xavi2327 points , 09:29 CET, Tue 03 Mar. 2009: oups, plugin version only works for registered users here in tw.o. E.g.: [Link]
chibaguy2802 points , 20:27 CET, Sat 28 Feb. 2009: orionrobots, I'm updating Planetfall for Tiki 3 so would be interested in what you're doing. :-)
orionrobots62 points , 17:04 CET, Sat 28 Feb. 2009: Hooray! Orionrobots upgrade and rebrand complete. When there is some time, I need to bubble back changes I had to make to planetfall to make it work - it is not quite complete.

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