Determining the Destiny of the Ultimate Showdown

The point of the showdown is not to determine which CMS is better in all use cases, it’s to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of each one to provide people with decision-making tools that they can use when trying to determine which of these three open source content management systems might be a good fit for their individual needs. To that end, none of us who were involved in putting together the project will be involved in declaring an overall “winner”; instead, our role is to gather as much information as possible, present it to our audience, and let them make the decision for themselves.

Some of the pieces of information we’re collecting include:

• An evaluation by the designer of how well each team implemented and extended his design.
• An evaluation by a non-technical community leadership program expert on how well each site meets her needs and how easy it is to for her to use.
• The number of lines of custom PHP or Javascript required to build the site.
• The page weight for each site, and how well each one validates against Web standards.
• How many hours it took each team to implement each specific feature requested in the spec, and the challenges experienced by each one.

After SXSW is over, we’ll also be setting up a Web site where anyone can download all of the material we’ve gathered, peruse it at his or her leisure, and come to his or her own conclusions. I’ll also be presenting a special pre-conference session at CMS Expo here in Chicago at the end of April that provides a more in-depth look at each CMS platform and summarizes the lessons that we learned from the project.

While I honestly have no idea which team will end up being declared the victor by the audience, I can tell you that all three teams submitted incredibly strong entries, and I think we’re going to see a lot of commonly-held stereotypes about each CMS challenged or overturned by this exercise.

One wonderful and unexpected thing that we’ve already seen come out of this project is the release of several new patches that will enhance the functionality of all three content management platforms. If there’s one lesson that can be taken out of this exercise, it’s that the open source model for software development is the real winner here. Or to put it another way, as Amy Stephen of the Joomla! team recently posted to Twitter, “What this event shows is #DrupalSxSW, #JoomlaSxSW, #WordPressSxSW offer the world awesome choice for community building. Free software FTW!”