• Monday, 24 August 2009 23:21
• Written by Dan Knauss

(This is old news, but nobody has written it yet.)

At "The Ultimate Showdown of Content Management Destiny," the Joomla! team basically smoked the Drupal and Wordpress teams by every measure used in the judging: least time to complete, fully valid HTML, least CSS errors (1), lowest page weight, and least libenes (by far) of custom coding. Plus, the Joomla entry looks the best. It came in a close second to Drupal on the single-user usability testing. (Lucky for Drupal this was only a frontend usability test.)

So what was the contest verdict? Nobody wins, everyone's a winner!

It's no secret the contest was conceived, organized, and judged by a bunch of Drupal people--mainly Palantir.net's owner George DeMet and designer Mark Boulton, who had been recently hired by Drupal founder/trademark owner/lead developer Dries Buytaert to make the Drupal 7 interface a usable one. DeMet was in the position of judging his own staff and the software platform his business is based on according to contest rules and specifications he created. The specs were based on one of his company's clients, who gave input on them. Allowing that much conflict of interest into the contest was a bad idea, but given how much it was stacked in favor of Drupal, the Drupal team's poor performance raises a lot of questions.

According to DeMet, the reason why there was no winner was the lack of live demos to show people at SXSW. (Well, that was supposed to be his job.) For some reason the contest organizers (DeMet) didn't demo the three sites the teams created, and the audience did not want to pick a winner without something to actually vote on. That's a fair reaction from the audience, and so was their expectation of demos and a popular vote-based decision. (This was a technology and interactive, multimedia focused conference after all.) The demo sites existed and could be tried out online, so what gives?

A week earlier, DeMet had written on his blog that he and the other contest organizers would not "be involved in declaring an overall 'winner.'" "Instead," he wrote, "our role is to gather as much information as possible, present it to our audience, and let them make the decision for themselves." That is exactly what didn't happen. It's clear DeMet did make the final decision--the bland indecision/non-decision for a three-way tie--since it was written into his and Boulton's slide presentation for the SXSW panel where audience members expected they would picking the winner.

Before this contest concluded, I was prepared to keep an open mind--mainly about DeMet's capacity to have one, and certainly his intention to stick by his claims and promises. Aside from his elimination of the audience-based vote and feigned suprise that this was contingent on the expected public demos, the idea of publicly releasing the templates/themes designed by each team seems to have fallen by the wayside. DeMet caught some flak for this on his blog, which he seems to have ignored. (Note the ironic post title, "Determining the Destiny of the Ultimate Showdown.")

At least Colleen Carroll had already posted the Drupal contest theme ("Austin," a Zen sub-theme) at drupal.org before the three-way tie was declared. The Wordpress and Joomla contributions seem to be unavailable. For all the buildup, the followup to the contest's disappointing conclusion has been an overwhelming silence.

Cover-ups, broken promises, and disingenuous explanations aren't good for anybody, especially when they're so petty and hard to account for. Why not just release the stuff, as is? Hence this post and this comment on DeMet's blog:

George, you came up with the contest idea, organized it, and developed the specs and evaluation with your staff, one of your clients, and a guy being paid to working on Drupal 7. Your own employees formed most of the Drupal team. It's beyond belief that the real reason why a winner was not picked is that you didn't realize people in attendance wanted to see demos so they could make an informed vote. SXSW is about interactive, multimedia, technology.

Do you really expect people to believe you didn't know everyone expected to be able to evaluate demos of the team entries for themselves, which were available well beforehand? So much for showing up for a showdown.

Why also has there not been an official release of all three team's themes, as promised? The only reason I can think of to explain this is the people involved in the contest have decided that open competition is unhealthy (mainly for their business interests) and have taken it upon themselves to suppress their work so no one can ever set up a public demo of the showdown that never happened.

Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress are fine pieces of software; I use and recommend them all for different purposes, largely along the lines of Barrie North's CMS selection flowchart. (Humorous and valid generalizations there.) Each is a pain to use at times; each has certain strengths and weaknesses. That does not make them equal or even similar--far from it. The SXSW contest helped clarify their differences in the context of an actual development project, despite the apparent agreement of its participants to quash the central point of the competition and its expected, much anticipated results. This is a disservice to the majority of Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress users--and prospective users--who really don't care about egos, brands, and other irrational bonds with software. They want the right tool for the job. That kind of insight and candor is hard to get from one-trick pony, platform partisan web developers. That's understandable, but it's also what competitions like the showdown can provide if they are properly executed.

If someone wants to start the contest post-mortem conversation that didn't happen, here's some more red meat: Given the contest specs for a collaborative, networking site and the fact that the Joomla team was only able to deliver these features using all-GPL extensions by using the Tamka extension suite (still in alpha), as long as time and money were not a major constraint on the hypothetical client and development team (major real-world issues), Drupal was better suited to the task...at the time of the contest. As long as the hypothetical client is willing to do a lot of reading and spend a lot of time laboring to learn how to operate the Drupal administrative interface....

Related:

• How it went down, according to CMS Wire: Part 1 - Part 2
• Links to all three team entry results
• Tom Botell's session notes at the contest panel
• Jen Reeves' summary
• The Joomla Blogger hazards an opinion: time is money
• The Joomla Podcast interview with Steve Fisher, lead designer for the Joomla team, after the contest
• Steve's videos on the contest and Joomla entry - and more from Amy Stephen
• Lullabot podcast interview with Jeff Eaton, and another with Colleen Caroll, both from the Drupal team