Review of the Review
eZ Publish topped the 2010 list of best open source CMS at TopTenReviews.com. http://cms-software-review.toptenreviews.com/ That made me curious about the credentials of the toptenreview.com editors. Not because I don't support their findings, but because I wondered what makes a toptenreview.com more legit than any other review. There is not much to support their expertise on their site, and it seems that you can find a review to support just about any conclusion you believe in these days.
Finding nothing on their site to support their supposed expertise, my next step was reading the reviewer comments to decide for myself expertise or bias. I had reviewed for my own purpose the top four and Mambo a few years back when looking to move into something more complete and easier to admin than Wordpress.
While I would still like to see some credentials to support the expertise of their reviews, my review of their review left me favorably impressed. In depth knowledge of what is required in a CMS was evident, the feature sets were reported accurately, and best of all the summaries were spot on.
Reading below the headlines, toptenreviews.com accurately reports that each of the top four is a great CMS design. But each of them is geared for a different kind of audience and purpose. Each attracts a loyal following by doing what they do best.
A summary of the summaries.
eZ is number one based upon the reviewed feature set. But to use all that power requires somebody who understands core Web development functionality.
Wordpress is easiest to set up and use, plenty powerful for light duty, an obvious choice for simple requirements.
Drupal is extraordinary light on resources by virtue of being more or less a kernel. Very little functionality is included out of the box, third party extensions are required to do just about anything with it. Lots of extensions means lots of extensions to manage.
Joomla is a good overall blend of features versus ease of use. Not not quite as powerful as eZ, not nearly as simple as Wordpress. But easier for a layman to comprehend than eZ, and far more powerful than Wordpress.
Bingo, toptenreviews goes 4 for 4 on the summations.
Not Covered
Update cycles and ease of upgrades is a consideration that really should be addressed for those seeking the best CMS for their purpose. Software has to move forward just to keep up. eZ is on a 6 month upgrade cycle which is nice for staying on cutting edge. That said, eZ upgrades can be a bear. Not sure how this relates to the other offerings. My experience is Wordpress is much easier to upgrade. With far fewer features to manage, it should be.
Ease of wholesale data transfer into and out of the system is another high impact feature that is not addressed. Actively developed extensions ease the burden in eZ. Not sure how the other offerings compare. My experience is that moving up from Wordpress is a complete manual transfer. Basically a cut and paste of all existing content, very time consuming. But very nice that the editing interface in eZ seems to capture the html formatting from wp reasonably well.
Overall, very pleased with the thorough and accurate coverage by toptenreviews. Whomever the mystery reporters are, they do a great job in this man's humble opinion.
One last thing not covered, at least I could not find it, is the requirements for being included in the top ten. Perhaps reported size of the development community? I personally would love to see Concrete5 thrown in. It looks very promising upon cursory install and use. Seems to be the Portland, OR equivalent of eZ Publish beginnings with a designed MVC code base and core development group. Concrete5 also has by far the best embedded sales spiels of any CMS I have ever downloaded, and I have downloaded a bunch.