The Ultimate Showdown of Open Source Web CMS

FC Member Blog

BY Jan PabellonWed Apr 8, 2009 at 8:18 PM

This blog is written by a member of our blogging community and expresses that member's views alone.

At the recent SXSW (or South by Southwest Conference), they recently held “the ultimate open source CMS showdown.” The format of the event was patterned after “Project Runway” and “The Iron Chef” reality shows where three teams of all-star Web developers were asked to build a Web site in each of their chosen platforms using a single design concept (in this case provided by the award winning Mark Boulton Design studios) and project specification (a fictional nonprofit). Participants came from the camps of three of the best known and most widely used open source CMS projects out there: Drupal, Joomla and WordPress.

At the recent SXSW (or South by Southwest Conference), they recently held “the ultimate open source CMS showdown.” The format of the event was patterned after “Project Runway” and “The Iron Chef”
reality shows where three teams of all-star Web developers were asked
to build a Web site in each of their chosen platforms using a single
design concept (in this case provided by the award winning Mark Boulton
Design studios) and project specification (a fictional nonprofit).
Participants came from the camps of three of the best known and most
widely used open source CMS projects out there: Drupal, Joomla and WordPress.

The session included walkthroughs of all three sites and the teams
were given time to present how they tackled development and execution
of the projetct specs. At the end of the session, judges were asked to
decide the best platform and best execution of the concept.

The results? Check it out here:

What’s New | The Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny

March 17, 2009, 4:45pm - New page outlining the competition, with links to the project spec, designs, and SXSW slides added.

March 17, 2009, 4:00pm - Another great article on the Showdown from CMS Wire.

March 16, 2009, 11:59pm - Great article about the SXSW Showdown on CMS Critic.

March 16, 2009, 2:00pm - It’s been just over an hour since the
conclusion of the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System
Destiny panel at SXSW Interactive, and already the Internets are abuzz
speculating about who “won” the competition between Drupal, Joomla!,
and WordPress.
We had an overflow audience for the session, and at the end when it
came to asking the audience to pick a winner, an amazing thing
happened: they refused to decide, saying they wanted to learn more
about all three projects before rendering a verdict.