CMS Matrix -- Built-in Applications and Commerce

If you've weathered this week's blog posts this far, you've seen my charts of the feature counts in CMS Matrix for ten CMSs.  Those ten are the ones that are at the top of the list if you click on the "Sort by compares" tab.  Besides total number of features (there are 133 of them in the matrix), I've also broken them down by the nine categories that are used to organize this large list of features.  There's a graph for security, support, ease of use, performance, management, interoperability, and, with the three last shown below, flexibility (9 features), built-in applications (39 features) and commerce (9 features). 

Flexibility has to do with an eclectic assortment of things:  URL rewriting, user profiles, localization, and such.  With Plone's strong history of multi-lingual support, it's no surprise to see it at the top.  Also pegging the flexibility meter are Joomla, TYPO3, and eZ Publish.  Drupal only misses one feature in this set; the others in the mid-range below 80%.  Once again PHP Nuke is at the bottom. 

Built-in applications consists of a dizzying list of features that cover the entire gamut of things-to-do with the Web.  They range from blogging capability through mail forms to wikis.  It's difficult to imagine anyone needing even a fraction of these features, but I suppose it gives you some idea of the breadth of coverage a particular CMS has in the total online space.

Once again TYPO3 and Plone lead the pack with most close behind.  WordPress and eZ Publish lag a little further down and, guess who, PHP Nuke, brings up the rear. 

The commerce feature set is a handful of items that are useful in an e-commerce environment:  shopping cart, shipping, online payments, inventory management, etc.  This is Plone's weakest area and TYPO3 (plus WebGUI) is right there at the same level.  Four other CMSs are higher in this category and three are lower with two of them at zero.

Mercifully, that ends the categories from CMS Matrix.  Coming up next, another look at the overall scores and some reflections on what it means.