CMS Wire has posted a new study revealing the most popular Open Source CMS systems based on their research and survey’s conducted on their behalf.

This paper is about the brand strength and market share of 20 open source web content
management systems. As such, it provides you with important information relevant to selecting
a CMS, but it should not be read as a final judgment on the feature quality, stability, or a
particular system’s suitability for your project. With that said, our goal is to provide a body of
useful data which will help you make a more informed decision about which product is the
best fit for your next project.

As expected, the “big three” continue to dominate the market, with some shifting of their respective positions in different categories. Newcomers face some significant work to crack into the top spot.

As relates to WordPress, it was at the top of the list when they looked at Average Weekly Downloads, but came in third when analyzing their “current or most common use,” suggesting a lot of people download it, but don’t use it as a CMS. It should be noted that 13.7% of respondents said they used WordPress most commonly, whereas the next one down, Alfresco, has only 4.4% usage. A signifcant margin. The top 2 products were Joomla (20.6%) and Drupal (14.0%). This ranking holds true for overall “Rate of Adoption”

WordPress came out far ahead of both Joomla and Drupal in Brand Strength, which is an accumulated rating covering social media mentions, bookmarking, search queries and several other factors.

The report is well researched and founded, explaining their methodology and pointing out discrepancies where they exist or may be perceived. I highly recommend reading it as it highlights 20 different CMS platforms, including some you may not have heard of. One caveat – to receive the report, you need to fill out a form and give them some information, however the form does redirect to the download immediately, so you don’t have to be 100% truthful.

CMS Wire – Open Source CMS platform report

If you have a look down the very bottom of this site, you’ll see a bright red bar that travels up and down with the page, and has some buttons.

It’s a toolbar being provided by Wibiya as part of their Beta program. It’s an interesting concept that I’ve seen on a few different sites lately and have been asked about by a few clients as well. I’m testing it here, and on another client site that I can’t mention.

Some of the features include Twitter and Facebook integration, site search, photo gallery, and live notifications which allows the owner to post something that is announced to visitors when they visit. All features can be activated or deactivated at your whim. The Wibiya.com site also assists with installation instructions on a variety of platforms, including Blogger, WordPress and TypePad as well as providing an HTML version allowing it to be installed on virtually any site.

Setting it up was simple, and management of it’s features is done entirely through the Wibiya site. They over close to 30 different color combinations allowing you to match your theme, or contrast with it to help it stand out. The toolbar also tracks visits giving you some basic stats, although the potential is obviously there to track a lot more details.

When I first installed it, the toolbar only appeared on single posts, but not the homepage. This is something that has been reported on their site a few times and no resolution has been posted, but it did begin to work spontaneously for me. Since the majority of the work is done from their servers, updates and fixes are instant.

The downside of course is that you’re relying on a third-party service for this.

As I run the test, somewhat longer than a day, I’ll let you know how it goes.