HyperContent: A dead open source CMS?

Do you know if your CMS is dead or alive? Whether it has a bright or a bleak future? When higher education software consortium Jasig announced that they would discontinue their support for HyperContent in December 2008, it was a timely reminder that systems do die. Who knows whether other and more popular systems are about to suffer the same fate as HyperContent?

To quote from the announcement:

The community of adopters has not grown enough to attract multiple committers, and new development has been frozen for well over a year. As a result, the application no longer meets criteria for our continued sponsorship.

HyperContent was a fully featured open source  Java-based Web CMS. It had seen some adoption among higher education, e.g. Columbia University, University of Latvia and The University of Hull which is still using it today. HyperContent can no longer be found on the Jasig website, but interestingly the project front page still exists on hypercontent.sourceforge.net. On this page the most recent release from 2006 is promoted as news and Jasig is mentioned as still sponsoring the system.

I am hopefully not the only one who thinks there are too many systems in the Web CMS marketplace. In my years in the young web industry, I’ve seen a few of systems that have died a slow death:

• The Mambo open source development team ended up disagreeing with an effort led by a private company in 2005 and then created a new CMS called Joomla! Today Mambo no longer seems to have a sustaining community.
• Microsoft CMS which in 2006 was replaced by SharePoint. Even today Microsoft CMS is still in use. To be fair, Microsoft continues to provide support and security fixes for a limited period.
• Synkron Via, a Danish commercial CMS originally released in 2006. Local competitor Dynamicweb stepped in to buy Synkron in 2007 and in 2008 CMS Watch dropped coverage of Synkron Via. Earlier this year Dynamicweb slashed the last remaining Synkron Via engineers. To be fair, Dynamicweb is still signing up new customers, so time will tell whether Synkron Via might recover and get back in shape.

If your CMS is riding into the sunset, you are effectively forced to select a new platform and invest time in implementing it. This might be good news as an overhaul of your web infrastructure could be long overdue. However, a scenario in which outside factors control your agenda is less than ideal.

Even though some vendors might be dying, the list of significant systems continue to grow. Alfresco, SilverStripe and Umbraco are among the most recent additions. In other words: Consolidation is still some years out.

When you consider the longevity of your CMS, look carefully at the same factors as Jasig did. A community is more important than features and if the latest major release is from over a year ago, it is usually a very bad sign.

Which CMS could be next?