The LocalGov CMS Directory has been updated, a process which takes place every 6 months to keep it up-to-date and useful. There have been a number of changes of CMS since the last version, but it hasn’t changed the order of the top 5 CMS.
| Content management system | Number of councils |
| Drupal | 89 (+3) |
| Jadu | 69 (+1) |
| Umbraco | 57 |
| GOSS iCM | 38 (+2) |
| WordPress | 29 (+1) |
In past reviews each website was checked individually by reviewing the code and references to a specific CMS. This can take a long time and be labour intensive. I then started using WhatCMS, a service which allows users to check a CMS. This was helpful in terms of doing the heavy lifting and speeding up the time taken to review 410 councils. On this occasion though WhatCMS couldn’t be used due to a security issue.
The whole exercise could be greatly simplified if council consistently added metadata to identify the CMS used. In this review I now review and report on this metadata. Here are some examples where councils have added metadata to help to identify the CMS used:
<meta name=”Generator” content=”Drupal 10 (LocalGov Drupal | https://localgovdrupal.org)”>
<meta name=”Generator” content=”Contensis CMS Version 16.0″>
<meta name=”Generator” content=”Joomla! – Open Source Content Management”>
From these examples we can see that a single line of metadata helps to identify:
- the CMS software used
- any version details
- any information relating to the provider of the CMS software
Sadly this information isn’t always included by councils on their public websites. At present more than half of councils fail to include any metadata to help to identify the CMS used. A small number of councils include metadata which just identifies the provider of the CMS, which is also unhelpful.
I would like to reach out to councils and their respective CMS providers and encourage them to add a short line of metadata to their websites to identify the CMS, version and any helpful information relating to the provider of the CMS software.
In general councils using Contensis, Drupal, Joomla, pTools, Sharepoint and WordPress are pretty good at adding metadata in this way. Councils using GOSS, Jadu, Kentico, Liferay, Umbraco and others are less likely to add any meaningful metadata to their websites. However, GOSS and Jadu websites can generally be identified as they usually include a ‘Powered by’ reference in the page footer.
LocalGov CMS Directory
Access the LocalGov CMS Directory using the button below. You can also find CMS usage maps by country on this page.