PHP still holds the No. 1 spot (as it has since February), but what’s more interesting are the “movers and shakers” this month. In particular, jobs in the “Graphic Design” and “Adobe Flash” categories have leaped up the index this month to end up in second and third places overall (up ten and six spots from last month, respectively) — this is good news for designers. Another big mover is jobs in the “Joomla!” category (breaking into the top 10 by rising 10 places to eighth), suggesting that there’s increasing demand for people skilled in the open-source CMS.

It’s more of a mixed bag for writers: While “Copywriting” (up 11 places to 23rd), “Editing” (up 16 spots to 48th)  and “Proofreading” (up 15 spots to 44th) are all winners, “Article Writing” (down five places to 7th) and “Online Writing” (down 12 places to 29th) are dropping down the index.

While some of these categories sound too similar to take this index all that seriously (how different is “Online Writing” from “Web Content,” really?) and you should remember that this is taking into account only jobs posted on one site, it’s still worth noting as a snapshot of the current freelance marketplace.

Here’s the Elance Online Work Index Top 10 for July.

1. PHP (–)
2. Graphic Design (+10)
3. Adobe Flash (+6)
4. MySQL (-1)
5. HTML (-1)
6. Web Content (+1)
7. Article Writing (-5)
8. Joomla! (+10)
9. CSS (-4)
10. WordPress (-2)

(Disclaimer: WordPress is produced by Automattic, a company that is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True Partners.)

Designers: Are you noticing an increase in demand for your skills recently?

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In this post, I’ll cover the newly overhauled version of OpenSourceCMS, which lets you put on your administrator gloves and try top, free CMS tools.

OpenSourceCMS goes beyond just collecting a series of online demos for CMS platforms; instead, it delivers user ratings for them, and allows you to play administrator for hours. If you do this, you can get a strong sense of the capabilities and limitations of these tools, which have become very strong in the past few years.

Where should you start if you have no experience at all with CMS platforms? Drupal happens to be a pet platform that I like, and it runs some of the web’s most popular sites, so consider starting with OpenSourceCMS’s Drupal Demo. You can get a feel for what it feels like to be the administrator of a Drupal-driven site, and you can watch free video tutorials on building and running a Drupal site.

Joomla is another very popular open source CMS choice, and you can get the feel of administration with the Joomla Demo here. You’ll find user comments down the page there, and an overall rating at the top of the page.

There are many other demos available for open source CMS platforms, found here. Under OpenSourceCMS’s E-Commerce category, you can also try out some of the free, e-commerce platform solutions. These are found here. Among them, Magento is a very fast-growing and well-liked choice, and OpenSourceCMS has a complete demo available for it. It gets a 4.3 star rating out of possible 5 from readers,

There are many other demos, news items, and forums related to free, open-source CMS platforms at OpenSourceCMS. Especially if you’re paying or considering paying for a proprietary solution, take some of the demos for a spin. A full-blown content management system may be overkill if you’re just producing a quick, miniature site for a client, but if you’re putting together a game plan for an ambitious site or blog, picking the right CMS platform is an excellent initial step.

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