The Most Popular Open Source CMS

According to a report issued by CMSWire (registration required), the Joomla! community has created the world's most popular open source content management system. Congratulations to everyone who contributed to this: core developers, people who answer forum questions, team members, translators, site implementers, extension developers, template designers, Joomla fans and everyone else who helps make Joomla the great platform that it is. 

Millions of people around the world use Joomla everyday to communicate and collaborate. How big is Joomla? In the past month the joomla.org websites had about 5 million visitors from 230 countries. In the Elance Work Index Joomla! is the top ranked application in jobs offered and at oDesk Joomla jobs have doubled in the last year. There have been over three million downloads since June.

The report contains lots of interesting information compiled by Water and Stone. Statistics include everything from downloads to books published to social media mentions. Joomla! lead in many but there is definitely room for improvement on some. This year's report included a small web survey of just over 600 self selected individuals. Although it is always hard to know how to interpret surveys like this, the results did show room for improvement in that a surprisingly high number of respondants reporting having a negative impression. Not that Joomla is anywhere near the worst on that, but it's below four other CMS on this. Social media mentions of Joomla were also lower expected on some metrics, but some of that may be due to the Joomla.org forums being excluded from the analysis.

All in all the report makes for interesting reading with both plenty to smile about but also room to improve. It is great to have this external acknowledgment of the accomplishments of the Joomla Community.