Nate Angell

Wandering IQ. Raised by wolves. Friend to cheese. Working to bend the arc of justice.

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UC-Davis University CMS Survey

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UC-Davis just published results from a well-designed survey on university web content management system usage.

Over 60% of respondents were using a web CMS and homegrown/open source systems were more common than proprietary systems.  Plone/Zope combined was the most common, followed closely by Homegrown, and then Drupal.

Today, the Requirements and Evaluation committee of the UC Davis Web CMS initiative posted results from an online survey of campuses completed last month.

The survey was conducted to collect comprehensive data about the adoption and use of Web content management systems among institutions of higher education, and to make this information available to communicators, webmasters, technologists and other key campus personnel. Our goal was to learn about the experiences – both positive and negative – of other universities in the adoption of Web CMS, and to share this information with those who may currently be considering the same.

Read the summary, and view and discuss the survey results at:
http://pubcomm-29.ucdavis.edu/?p=35

  • Matt B.

    If you combine them (as all Plone sites are also Zope sites) Zope is acually the winner.

    -Matt

  • On the evaluation page, it seems someone copied most of Joomla’s points for Drupal.

    Eg: Q: What is the worst thing about your web CMS?

    Joomla
    – Getting it to work and scale on the University’s preferred Sun/Oracle platforms and support procedures.
    – Its newness causing there to be less support for it than the older version.
    – Too many functions are enabled via workflow but workflow is very non intuitive and due to sheer amount of tech support calls we have to turn it off.
    – patching and upgrades
    – limited in design unless you have a designer who knows php.
    – With Plone, difficult to teach the way plone/zope work – not nearly as intuitive as joomla, probably others, but the payoff with plone is huge, especially for a large site.
    – departmental implementations with no central campus tool available.
    – development interface sucks, big time

    Drupal
    – fairly steep learning curve for technical staff
    – learning curve for development; too rapid upgrade cycle.
    – Getting it to work and scale on the University’s preferred Sun/Oracle platforms and support procedures.
    – Its newness causing there to be less support for it than the older version.
    – Too many functions are enabled via workflow but workflow is very non intuitive and due to sheer amount of tech support calls we have to turn it off.
    – patching and upgrades
    – limited in design unless you have a designer who knows php.
    – With Plone, difficult to teach the way plone/zope work – not nearly as intuitive as joomla, probably others, but the payoff with plone is huge, especially for a large site.
    – departmental implementations with no central campus tool available.
    – development interface sucks, big time