Major forces are buffeting the Web Content & Experience Management (WCM) marketplace, and key vendors and open source players are tacking in different directions in response. Some are expanding the scope of functionality, others are narrowing their focus, while others simply sail on like it's still the good old days.

As with most other terms in technology marketplaces, there are many variations and meanings of decoupling. Let's look at two general variants:

RSG has just released a significant update to our Web Content & Experience Management (WCM) vendor evaluations. That's version 22.5 for those of you keeping track

Like their commercial brethren, you can see a kind of restless desire among the major open source WCM projects to go "up-market," by making their systems more enterprise-friendly -- and by extension more complicated

A CMS that rarely needs any introduction – Joomla! – has recently launched a framework with the goal of letting developers "...combine Joomla! features with the features from other open source Web Content Management Systems to build their own CMS or app."

Security is a touchy subject in the Web CMS world in general and very touchy in particular among open source WCXM projects, since open source platforms are frequently accused (often unfairly) of being inherently insecure by dint of their more open development models.

So it's been interesting to watch some Plone adherents contrast their platform's security profile to that of some major competitors

We've released a major update to our Web Content and Experience Management (WCXM) Evaluations, which review 35 major CMS products from around the globe.

First and foremost, you will notice the name change:

This week, the Joomla! community released version 2.5 of its open source CMS package. There are many new features but the key highlights of the new release are

Earlier this week we released some key updates to our Web Content Management comparative vendor evaluations. This batch includes several players who claim to excel at "experience management." Unfortunately, they've generated substantially more new lines of marketing than new lines of code

The Joomla! open source WCM community today released version 1.7, just 6 months after the release of 1.6. Perhaps because the development team has been busy stabilizing a 1.6 trunk that was packed with many new features, version 1.7 does not offer much of significance for end users

This month's update to our Web CMS Report evaluations offers the latest critiques of nine web content management vendors:

An omnibus platform like SharePoint presents two challenges to Microsoft in the web publishing arena:

1. It doesn't employ the very latest version of .NET
2. Long update cycles means it can fall behind functionally

Neither challenge is prohibitive, but both are potentially problematic

I sometimes warn that a vendor's content management system is well suited to "simple" scenarios, but not necessarily a good fit for "more complex" cases. That's a bit problematic:

More than two years after it's last major version was released, the Web CMS project Joomla! has announced the beta version of its next major release (1.6). For an open source project, that's a lot of time between two versions.

I get that question a lot, especially since one of our main services is called "CMS Watch"