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If you are curious to know the most visited CMS web sites, a possible answer is provided by the Alexa site information, with the site traffic rank.

The Alexa traffic rank, based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data, could be assumed as a measure of the CMS current popularity among the Internet users. A visit to Alexa today gives the following results:

For details on the Alexa ranking system you can read The New Alexa Rankings.

Please note that our CMS statistics don’t make any claim of scientific accuracy, they are just intended to entertain our readers.

Only blog platforms and general content management systems are considered here; specialized systems, e.g. those building forums, wikis, image galleries and e-commerce sites are not included.

This stat is built counting the number of the incoming links to a CMS site. This number could be assumed as a measure of the CMS popularity among the Internet publishers.

A search on Yahoo! Site Explorer today gives the following results (in thousands of incoming links to the site):

Please note that our CMS statistics don’t make any claim of scientific accuracy, they are just intended to entertain our readers.

Only blog platforms and general content management systems are considered here; specialized systems, e.g. those building forums, wikis, image galleries and e-commerce sites are not included.

How many web pages are powered by our favorite blog platform or CMS? A possible answer is in the following table, that shows how many pages contain the statement “Powered by” followed by the CMS name. This number could be assumed as a measure of the CMS adoption among the Internet publishers.

Since not every CMS adopts the same credits statement, a different search string has been used where applicable. A Yahoo! web search today gives the following results (in thousands of pages found):

Of course pages powered by a CMS but without the “Powered by” statement are not counted, so the real numbers should be even higher, and the ranking could be different.

Please note that our CMS statistics don’t make any claim of scientific accuracy, they are just intended to entertain our readers.

Only blog platforms and general content management systems are considered here; more specialized systems, e.g. those building forums, wikis, image galleries and e-commerce sites are not included.

The year 2008 has seen a concentration of interest on just a few CMS or blog platforms, with an increasing distance between the most popular ones and the followers.

As in 2006 and 2007, I’m using the data from the Most visited CMS site report, based on the Alexa traffic rankings. We can see that there is a large gap between the first four and the fifth in rank.

The first places in the popularity chart for 2008 belong to the same trio who won them in 2006 and 2007, that is WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.

WordPress released its major versions 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 in 2008, Joomla! released its major version 1.5 in January and many minor ones during the year, while Drupal released the new 6.0 version in February and many updates afterwards.

Actually this wonderful trio holds the first, third and fourth position; the second position is unexpectedly conquered by PHP-Nuke, whose latest release is version 8.1 of August 2007.

The fifth place belongs to a brilliant new entry, TYPOlight, a very active PHP5 project led by Leo Feyer. TYPOlight released version 2.5.0 in December 2007 and version 2.6.0 in August 2008, with almost monthly updates.

Xoops rises to the sixth place, up from the seventh in 2007. Xoops released its major version 2.3.0 in September 2008, and apparently hasn’t suffered from the ImpressCMS fork that also happened in 2008.

The seventh place is for Movable Type, who held the fourth place in 2006 but dropped a bit under the radar in 2007. Movable Type released version 4.1 and 4.2 in 2008.

And, last but not least, the eight place is for Zikula, a reincarnation of PostNuke. Zikula debuted in June 2008 with version 1.0.0, the new name for the long awaited PostNuke 0.8.

Four platforms were present in the 2007 top eight, but dropped under the radar in 2008: Pligg, ExpressionEngine, Mambo and MODx.

They are possibly suffering for some reason. Pligg visible activity was lower than usual in 2008, version 1.0.0 RC1 has been released only in January 2009; ExpressionEngine kept its fans waiting for the major version 2.0 redesign, unexpectedly delayed; Mambo activity was also low in 2008, and the impact of the MiaCMS fork is being felt; and MODx also kept its fans waiting for version 2.0.0.

Another possible explanation is the new traffic ranking system that Alexa deployed in 2008; the new system averages many popularity factors, giving results sometimes very different from the former ones.

As usual, this article doesn’t make any claim of scientific accuracy, it’s just an attempt to discuss what happened last year in the wonderful world of Content Management Systems.

While in 2005 and 2006 Content Management Systems as a group were enjoying a steady rise in popularity, 2007 has been a year of stable if not slightly declining public interest in these systems.

The evidence comes from our Most visited CMS site report, based on Alexa traffic rankings. The absolute rankings of CMS sites are down compared with 2006, and this could be interpreted as a sign of declining interest.

Let’s now take a look at the relative rankings among CMS sites. The first three places in the popularity chart for 2007 are firmly held by the same three champions who won them in 2006: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.

WordPress released versions 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 in 2007, while Joomla! released 1.0.13 in July and 1.5 RC4 in December, and Drupal released 5.0 in January and 6.0 RC1 in December.

The fourth place belongs to Pligg, up from a very good eighth place in 2006. Pligg has just released its 9.9.0 version, and has confirmed its rising star status in the second year of its existence.

The fifth place is conquered by ExpressionEngine, up from the seventh place last year. ExpressionEngine has released its 1.6 version in June.

Mambo keeps the same sixth place it held in 2006. Mambo released two minor 4.6.x versions in April and December 2007.

Xoops drops to the seventh place, down from the fifth place in 2006. Xoops released two minor 2.0.x versions in August and December 2007.

And last but not least, the eighth place is conquered by MODx, up from the 12th place last year. MODx is a relatively young platform, it was born in 2005, and released its 0.9.6 version in May 2007.

Please note that these numbers don’t make any claim of scientific accuracy, but are intended for your entertainment only. Happy New Year!