CMSs that deal with document management are often called ECMs or Enterprise Content Management systems. Prior to the widespread use of computers, electronic documents, and data, companies and individuals had content management systems for their physical documents, photos, and files.

As offices have digitized over the past 20 or more years, CMSs have evolved to organize and streamline numerous aspects of document management. CMSs and ECMs can now: handle document management functions that range from capturing, storing, retrieving, and distributing documents, images, emails and faxes, to performing other valuable services, such as tracking these data by date, extracting text, keyword locating, publishing and securing these data, with the list of functions going on and on.

The biggest names in document management come from larger companies like Microsoft (SharePoint) and Oracle, but there are some open source ECMs – Alfresco notable among them – that offer a wide range of document management functions. Cloud computing is also expected to allow for easy document management in the future.

Popular open source CMSs like WordPress and Drupal offer different forms of document management. Modules within these CMSs allow for various document management functions.

Joomla! offers document management functionality as well. At the bottom of this post you’ll find a video demonstrating how to use Joomla! to load and share .pdf files. With several open source communities working on similar efforts to manage and share files, open source CMSs should offer more document management functions in the future.

Simplified, e-commerce is the buying or selling of products and services over an electronic system. This system is usually the Internet, but companies can also use specified networks for their e-tail (electronic retail).

E-commerce began in the 1970’s with transactions between companies on purchase orders and invoices sent electronically. This coincided with the rise of credit cards, setting the stage for simple, immediate transactions over the Internet. During the 1990’s, e-commerce remained relatively small until security protocols, DSL, and secure connections became more widespread, and people and businesses became comfortable with e-commerce. Now billions of dollars worth of merchandise and services is bought and sold online, with almost every major retailer and company offering their services online.

E-commerce platforms generally offer a Webstore that allows consumers to shop for products, checkout and pay. They also can help organize orders and payments.

As far as open source e-commerce platforms, the largest ones aren’t as dominant on the net as open source CMSs are with blogs and Web sites. The biggest open source e-commerce providers are osCommerce, Magento CMS, Zen Cart, X-Cart, VirtueMart, and Ubercart, and they combine for less than a quarter of the e-commerce platforms online, according to builtwith.com. Premium e-commerce providers like IBM Websphere Commerce, Yahoo Store, and GSI Commerce, meanwhile, provide almost 75 percent of the e-commerce on the Web.

Highlights from the report include a record number of registrants for DrupalCon and a new collection of plugins for the Hippo CMS in April (check out the video at the bottom of this post to see a demo version of some of the plugins from the article). In March meanwhile, DotNetNuke, GateIn, and others released new versions of their CMSs, while Plone and Joomla! continued work on their respective CMSs’ forthcoming versions.

While growing in number, blogs also grew in importance, with bloggers acting as a media outlet (in bringing down Senate majority leader Trent Lott in 2002) and as a media check (in uncovering as forgeries documents critical of George Bush’s service with the National Guard in 2004). In 2006, the power of blogs to drive debate and give voice to many was one of the reasons Time magazine’s person of the year was “you” (to the many people, presumably the reader included, who blog or participate in creating the information on the World Wide Web).

When it comes to publishing on the blogosphere, open source content management systems dominate, with WordPress’s open source blog application leading the way. WordPress is featured on 78 percent of Web sites with blog applications, far and away the leader in blog publishing in this category. Joomla! and Drupal are also popular choices for blogging, with blogs published within their larger CMSs.

Blogs usually follow a familiar format with entries posted in reverse-chronological order (most recent first). Timestamps on blogs allow viewers to know exactly what time blog entries were published, and categories help to organize a blogger’s entries. The ability of readers to post comments is also a key feature of most blogs, allowing for ongoing discussions between bloggers and their readers.

Most CMSs have various features that bloggers can use to make their blogs fit their preferences. Themes allow bloggers to change the look and template of their blogs, widgets help add useful features (like an RSS feed, a search function, and a calendar of entries), and plug-ins allow bloggers to install and activate features like spam control.

WordPress released its latest version (2.9, Carmen) December of 2009, and Joomla! has not set a date for the release of its newest version, Joomla! 1.6, although that too could happen soon.

Drupal 7.0 is supposed to improve on some of the criticisms earlier versions have faced, such as ease-of-use issues, which have allowed Joomla! and WordPress to grab large chunks of the low to mid-end CMS market.

Joomla!’s recent garnering of awards has shows its success both in popularity and peer review. The Packt annual Open Source CMS Awards bestowed two awards upon Joomla! in 2009: First Runner Up in the Packt Hall of Fame award, and Second Runner Up in the Best Open Source PHP award. Packt, a British publishing company, has written or published 18 books on Joomla! and how to use the system to manage content successfully. It also has published numerous other books on other popular content management systems such as WordPress, Moodle, and Drupal, and is therefore well placed to determine who is doing well in Open Source CMS, and who isn’t.

Aside from this critical acclaim, Joomla! has also become well known due to the large number of varying sites that use it as their CMS. Such companies include: the restaurant IHOP, the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, as well as newspapers and magazines such as Outdoor Photographer and the Tahoe World.

Aside from its product, Joomla! has a unique name, being one of the few organizations to feature an exclamation point (although Yahoo! made the punctuation fairly visible). The name Joomla! comes from the Swahili word Jumla, for “as a whole”. Joomla! was started by the core developers of Mambo CMS, who split with Mambo over concerns about Mambo’s direction. Joomla! 1.0.0 launched in 2005, to rave reviews, winning Packt awards in 2006 and 2007. Its most recent release was in November 2009 with Joomla! 1.5.15.

WordPress started in 2003 as the creation of Matt Mullenweg, who forked the code from the b2 blogging software to start the project. Mullenweg was only 19 at that time, a freshman at the University of Houston. A year later he dropped out of college and in 2005 started focusing on WordPress and related projects full time.

Since that time, the number of Web sites that use WordPress has expanded tremendously with currently just over two percent of the most popular sites on the Web using it, according BuiltWith.com, which provides CMS usage statistics.

WordPress is also critically acclaimed, winning the 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS Award from Packt Publishing. It also received First Runner-Up in the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category.

WordPress has an impressive list of companies that use it for content management on their Web sites. Some of these companies include: Fisher Price, Nikon, Pepsi, Nokia, Intel, OnStar, Best Buy and more. Furthermore, some of the Web sites that use WordPress for content management, while not Fortune 500 companies, are among the top Web sites in the U.S. and include: WordPress.com (ranked 19 in U.S. traffic by Alexa), GizModo.com (ranked 264), and MentalFloss.com (ranked 2,404).

WordPress’s latest release is WordPress 2.9.2, which came out February 15, 2010, and is based off of the December 2009 WordPress 2.9. All versions of WordPress, starting in 2004, feature names of famous jazz musicians. This latest version is named Carmen (for Carmen McRae). There have been 11 total versions of WordPress thus far, with names ranging from Strayhorn (version 1.5, for Billy Strayhorne) to Coltrane (version 2.7, for John Coltrane).

WordPress

Drupal came about in 2001 as an evolution in the code of the drop.org Web site by Belgian Dries Buytaert. Currently, its popularity is increasing substantially, with millions of users downloading Drupal each year, and 1.62 percent of the Web’s main sites now using Drupal in some form, up over 50 percent in the past year.

Moreover, Drupal has garnered notable critical acclaim throughout the past five years. Starting in 2006, when Drupal won second place in the Best Overall Open Source CMS Award from Packt Publishing, Drupal has been a leading award recipient, winning the Best Overall Open Source award in 2007, as well as earning second place in the Best PHP Open Source CMS Award and Best Social Networking Open Space CMS categories.

Drupal has also been named a Webware 100 winner from cnet.com for the past three years, and received the Best PHP Open Source CMS Award again in 2009 from Packt as well as the inaugural Hall of Fame Award which was awarded to the best open source CMS that has already won the Overall Award (Joomla! got second place).

The name Drupal comes from the Dutch word “Druppel”, meaning drop (like a droplet of water), which helps explain Drupal’s logo:

Drupal

The most recent release of Drupal is Drupal 6.16, which debuted March 10. Drupal 7 is expected to be released soon, although no official date has been set.