The three big three contenders in the open source CMS world are Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress. The folks at Devious Media boiled each of their advantages/disadvantages down to a simple comparison and Joomla comes off looking pretty sweet.

Here at Network World, we use Drupal and as I deal with it everyday, I can testify I have a love/hate relationship with it. It's powerful but complicated. Drupal takes a big hit with this comparison, but the latest upgrade, Drupal 7, released earlier this year, hopes to address some of the management issues with the CMS. (See Network World's review: Drupal 7 simplifies Web site management.) Meanwhile, Joomla has come a long way. It has been pushing itself beyond content management and recasting itself as a full-on Web development platform. Indeed, that's why eBay chose Joomla as the basis of a massive intranet-based community project it began building out in the fall. Yet, Joomla has its detractors, too, who prefer Drupal's robustness.

For its part, WordPress hasn't got the street cred the other two have. It's still seen as a good platform for the SMB market, though it has grabbed some big users, too. WordPress.com suffered a red face in the spring when a pair of DDoS attacks brought down its free blog hosting site two days in a row. To its credit, WordPress quickly put the kibosh on the second attack and these outages don't reflect the code base of the CMS itself, but the infrastructure that supports its blog site.

By the way, another Open Source Subnet blogger, Alan Shimel, likes DotNetNuke as an open source CMS for companies developing on .Net. So there are open source options for Microsoft-centric shops, too. DotNetNuke just announced a major new release, too.

And there are other open source CMSs out there to consider, too, like Alfresco, Concrete5 and Umbraco.

Here's how Devious Media sees the Big 3 contenders. Do you agree?

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