Ametys CMS

Ametys is a fully open source web platform, and the vendor is explicit about what that means commercially: solutions can be used without any licence fees. For organisations weighing Java content management options, that removes the largest recurring cost in this category. The platform is split into Ametys Portal for web content and portal delivery and Ametys Workspaces for collaborative work, with a development framework for building on top of it.

Community activity is published openly on the site rather than described in general terms, which is a genuinely useful signal for anyone assessing an open source project's health. At the time of checking, the site reported 15 issues resolved in the last week, 736 commits in the last month and 14 contributors active in the previous 48 hours. Cumulative figures given are more than 2,135 million lines of code, over 25,780 downloads, more than 160 digital projects and over 750,000 hours of development. For an open source platform, sustained commit and contributor activity is the most reliable indicator that support will still exist in three years.

Ametys 4 is the current major release, described as adding new features and performance improvements. Getting started material, online training, a resources hub, a community wiki, a forum and an issue tracker are all published, and the community is described as bringing together developers, architects and anyone interested in open source web initiatives. An online demo is available without installing anything, and Bitnami packaging allows Ametys to be run locally, in a virtual machine or hosted in the cloud with a one-click install, which lowers the effort of a first evaluation considerably. The site is available in English and French.