Its New Year's Eve and time to announce Plone Metrics Person of the Year, the person deemed most influential* in the past year. The 2008 winner of this prestigious award, garnering all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto,** is Joel Burton.
I'd heard Joel's presentation back in Seattle in 2006 and had the good fortune to take his Theming Plone 3 Bootcamp in DC ahead of the 2008 Conference. And in this regard, Joel is merely the standard bearer for all the incredible Plone trainers out there who are not only great instructors, but advocating every day for Plone. His endless patience, good humor, and powerful presentation make his training seminars top notch.
But on top of that, Joel has provided a web interface to Archetypes generation with his online UML site. Its this tool that has allowed me to effectively use Plone and Zope as a means of introducing students to object-oriented databases and data-driven web services.
Instead of spending time getting students comfortable with Python so that they can run ArchGenXML, we concentrate on ArgoUML models and leave the software flags to Mr. Burton. In practically no time students have installed a local version of Plone on their systems and designed a functional customization to be delivered via the Web.
Its that kind of tool that takes something good (ArchGenXML) and turns it into something approachable by the masses, makes it truly useable. For being an outstanding Plone instructor and for giving us uml.joelburton.com, Plone Metrics is pleased to award Joel Burton the Plone Metrics Person of the Year Award.
_______________
* At least from my limited and very personal point of view.
** I'll buy the winners a beer when we're next in the same time zone.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Monday, December 29, 2008
2008 Recap
Not much new in the CMS world this evening, although with all the distractions in my life at the moment, I'm sure to have missed something significant. I did turn up a December "how to choose a CMS" article and a nice write up on Plone in Italy. Also worthy of note from late November, is the announcement that Joel Burton and Roberto Allende have been named to the Plone Foundation's Advisory Board.
All that aside, I thought I'd take a stab at summarizing 2008 from the point of view of Plone Metrics. You'll have to set your way-back machine to 5 Jan when I endorsed Obama based largely on his tech-savy approach and alignment with my international work. After that I explored Google trends, where Plone's slow downward slide continues to this day.
Of particular note is that World Plone Day (labeled 'E') made a blip in the news references and a significant peak in search volume.
Since then this blog has explored YouTube stats like Eben Moglen's 2006 Keynote (still getting dozens of views per day), comparative analysis of CMS entries in Wikipedia, and an initial look at the numbers in CMS Matrix.
February brought the first Plone Strategic Summit and some introspection about who was searching for what when they stumbled across Plone Metrics. Some permutation of "CMS file sharing" turns out to be the winning search terms.
March found excitement in Tibet, Plone Symposium East, and some JBOSS musings. April turned up the first references to World Plone Day and the NOLA Plone was getting finalized. I took my first foray into Technorati and blog posts. Plone does extremely well in the metric of posts/blog.
In May I was sent to Turin, Italy to listen to requirements for a UN agency's knowledge management system. I also got to meet Dr. Bates Gill of SIPRI, who interestingly are using Plone for their nuclear nonproliferation portal. In June we took a look at Simpson's Paradox and CMS Matrix ratings plus an analysis of NTEN's CMS satisfaction report and quarterly Amazon stats.
July turned up the SourceForge Community Choice Awards, more anecdotes about file sharing and CMS, and some further anecdotal items from TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design). August was a month for the Bossies, some political potificating, and some interesting visualizations of various CMS home sites. My first piece about using Plone for teaching back in August turns out to be one of the most frequently visited pages. I hope other database design instructors are using Plone and Zope as exemplars of OO databases.
A discussion of hybrid Plone-SharePoint solutions, the Connexions piece in the NY Times, Hurricane Ike and Enfold, and a look at the Plone.net numbers kept things interesting in September.
October was an exciting month, what with Joel's Bootcamp ahead of the 2008 World Plone Conference. I converted a set of Drupal online graphs into corresponding ones for Plone and I see that they are "live," continuing to display the most recent time intervals. The month ended with Martin Aspeli receiving a Packt award for Open Source CMS Most Valuable Person followed a day later by Plone taking top honors for Best Other Open Source CMS in Packt's annual survey.
In November I posted about strategies to get high visibility with Amazon sales stats when new Plone books roll out. There were also postings about developer community growth and, of course, World Plone Day. Oh, yes, there was this minor election in the U.S.
December has turned out to be a quiet month for me, not by choice--elderly parents took priority. Even so I managed to sneak in my quarterly Amazon stats and a posting about database design and manual vs automated methods for modeling and normalizing data schema.
In conclusion I'd like to thank the many readers who have supported these efforts. The numbers at Google Analytics show a slow but steady rise in readership. I'm not ready to quit my day job yet and you'll not see ads on Plone Metrics unless I'm trying to determine some parameter associated with Plone marketing.
All that's left is to come up with Plone Metric's Person of the Year. Feel free to make nomenations via comments and I'll take them under advisement.
All that aside, I thought I'd take a stab at summarizing 2008 from the point of view of Plone Metrics. You'll have to set your way-back machine to 5 Jan when I endorsed Obama based largely on his tech-savy approach and alignment with my international work. After that I explored Google trends, where Plone's slow downward slide continues to this day.
Of particular note is that World Plone Day (labeled 'E') made a blip in the news references and a significant peak in search volume.Since then this blog has explored YouTube stats like Eben Moglen's 2006 Keynote (still getting dozens of views per day), comparative analysis of CMS entries in Wikipedia, and an initial look at the numbers in CMS Matrix.
February brought the first Plone Strategic Summit and some introspection about who was searching for what when they stumbled across Plone Metrics. Some permutation of "CMS file sharing" turns out to be the winning search terms.
March found excitement in Tibet, Plone Symposium East, and some JBOSS musings. April turned up the first references to World Plone Day and the NOLA Plone was getting finalized. I took my first foray into Technorati and blog posts. Plone does extremely well in the metric of posts/blog.
In May I was sent to Turin, Italy to listen to requirements for a UN agency's knowledge management system. I also got to meet Dr. Bates Gill of SIPRI, who interestingly are using Plone for their nuclear nonproliferation portal. In June we took a look at Simpson's Paradox and CMS Matrix ratings plus an analysis of NTEN's CMS satisfaction report and quarterly Amazon stats.
July turned up the SourceForge Community Choice Awards, more anecdotes about file sharing and CMS, and some further anecdotal items from TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design). August was a month for the Bossies, some political potificating, and some interesting visualizations of various CMS home sites. My first piece about using Plone for teaching back in August turns out to be one of the most frequently visited pages. I hope other database design instructors are using Plone and Zope as exemplars of OO databases.
A discussion of hybrid Plone-SharePoint solutions, the Connexions piece in the NY Times, Hurricane Ike and Enfold, and a look at the Plone.net numbers kept things interesting in September.
October was an exciting month, what with Joel's Bootcamp ahead of the 2008 World Plone Conference. I converted a set of Drupal online graphs into corresponding ones for Plone and I see that they are "live," continuing to display the most recent time intervals. The month ended with Martin Aspeli receiving a Packt award for Open Source CMS Most Valuable Person followed a day later by Plone taking top honors for Best Other Open Source CMS in Packt's annual survey.
In November I posted about strategies to get high visibility with Amazon sales stats when new Plone books roll out. There were also postings about developer community growth and, of course, World Plone Day. Oh, yes, there was this minor election in the U.S.
December has turned out to be a quiet month for me, not by choice--elderly parents took priority. Even so I managed to sneak in my quarterly Amazon stats and a posting about database design and manual vs automated methods for modeling and normalizing data schema.
In conclusion I'd like to thank the many readers who have supported these efforts. The numbers at Google Analytics show a slow but steady rise in readership. I'm not ready to quit my day job yet and you'll not see ads on Plone Metrics unless I'm trying to determine some parameter associated with Plone marketing.
All that's left is to come up with Plone Metric's Person of the Year. Feel free to make nomenations via comments and I'll take them under advisement.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
A Very Plone Christmas to All
I was going to just leave a comment to M.B., but when I hit 500 characters I thought it best to make it an entire posting.
Re: Theoretical vs real. As a DOE/NNSA laboratory, we're pretty much frozen at the moment with funding only coming from Congress' most recent continuing resolution. However, Plone work continues to grow.* At the risk of getting a deluge of resumes, I'd be glad to file yours for future reference if you send it to kehorak at sandia dot gov, the e-mail for my professional alter ego and day job.
I, too, lean towards the application front end and am very lucky that in Plone I only occasionally am down in the ZMI and very, very rarely in real python.
That said, I'd much rather work through someone else's Python code than try to understand a typical PHP script. (That was said knowing that Drupal's PHP may be much more rigorously coded that "typical" PHP.)
Back to my teaching philosophy, if I played the numbers game (something like 20 million PHP sites out there**), I'd be teaching only Drupal, PHP, and SQL Server. Fortunately, other faculty are teaching PHP, so I can skate on that one. When it comes to databases, though, I largely teach plain-Jane (and plain-John) SQL, but with a strong emphasis on using automated tools (yes, even MS Access QBE) to do the grunt work. Similarly, whether ERWin or Visio or other tool, those kinds of automated assistance are fundamental to being able to correctly and quickly normalize very large database schema.
There are plenty of RDBMSs out there and everyone can conceptualize a hierarchical one like your local harddrive, but only a few useful object-oriented DBMSs. I find that Zope fills that latter niche very well and that Plone is a key extension. To be able to give a student a working web server, OO database, and a means of customizing it from a model is a huge instructional advantage. The number of students who go on to create working applications in under 15 weeks is not insignificant and speaks to the utility of the Plone/UML combo.
And like the ghosts of Christmas, they do it all in one night.
_______________
*
I know its got to be unsustainable, but we continue to have exponential growth :-)
** Where does Wikipedia come up with these numbers??
Re: Theoretical vs real. As a DOE/NNSA laboratory, we're pretty much frozen at the moment with funding only coming from Congress' most recent continuing resolution. However, Plone work continues to grow.* At the risk of getting a deluge of resumes, I'd be glad to file yours for future reference if you send it to kehorak at sandia dot gov, the e-mail for my professional alter ego and day job.
I, too, lean towards the application front end and am very lucky that in Plone I only occasionally am down in the ZMI and very, very rarely in real python.
That said, I'd much rather work through someone else's Python code than try to understand a typical PHP script. (That was said knowing that Drupal's PHP may be much more rigorously coded that "typical" PHP.)
Back to my teaching philosophy, if I played the numbers game (something like 20 million PHP sites out there**), I'd be teaching only Drupal, PHP, and SQL Server. Fortunately, other faculty are teaching PHP, so I can skate on that one. When it comes to databases, though, I largely teach plain-Jane (and plain-John) SQL, but with a strong emphasis on using automated tools (yes, even MS Access QBE) to do the grunt work. Similarly, whether ERWin or Visio or other tool, those kinds of automated assistance are fundamental to being able to correctly and quickly normalize very large database schema.
There are plenty of RDBMSs out there and everyone can conceptualize a hierarchical one like your local harddrive, but only a few useful object-oriented DBMSs. I find that Zope fills that latter niche very well and that Plone is a key extension. To be able to give a student a working web server, OO database, and a means of customizing it from a model is a huge instructional advantage. The number of students who go on to create working applications in under 15 weeks is not insignificant and speaks to the utility of the Plone/UML combo.
And like the ghosts of Christmas, they do it all in one night.
_______________
*
I know its got to be unsustainable, but we continue to have exponential growth :-)** Where does Wikipedia come up with these numbers??
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Manual vs Automatic
One of my YouTube videos for my College of Santa Fe course in database design picked up an interesting comment the other day. The respondent said, "I'd personally never hire a DBA that lacked the ability to normalize using method #1 [manual normalization]." My answer in turn has a bearing on Zope, Plone, Python, Archetypes, and Joel Burton.
I'll admit that I've been paying my rent in large part based on the skills that I learned back in the 80s from my Oracle Masters classes on manual normalization. But today a machine can generate a model or SQL more quickly and accurately than a human.
With frameworks like Zope and Plone out there, I'd much rather have a good object-oriented person working for me. In the end, its going to be job requirements that should drive any hiring decision, not some a priori statement. One could equally say that I'd never hire a printer who couldn't illuminate a cover page by hand.
I am reminded of my graduate statistics professor (Dr. Karl, UA) who taught us this bizarre matrix method for computing the solution to ANOVA problems. Even in matrix notation, to get an exact answer, sums of squares had to be painfully cranked out on a hand calculator. And interestingly, he never asked for an exact numeric solution, only the matrix formulation.
A year later I was hired as a post-doc at the NMSU Dept. of Horticulture to do onion karyotyping and agricultural statistics. A program named SAS was used there. It only required that I put the data in a Fortran-like data file and define the problem as a matrix solution. Exactly what I was taught. I never had to manually calculate a sum of squares--the machine did all the grunt work.
What I want in a new hire is someone who understands objects conceptually and can use whatever tools are handy to generate a data model, a needed SQL statement, or a Web-enabled form that interacts with a backend database. While its handy to have a fundamental understanding of normalization, a high level of skill in manual normalization isn't usually needed.
Now in the Zope/Plone world, my webmaster (not a Python programmer at all) can build a UML model, run the ZARGO file through Joel's web tool, and unpack the archetype in the correct Plone products folder. A trivial amount of Python is all that is needed to manually change simple things like misspelled labels, incorrect widget types, and so on.
Being able to go from UML to functional Plone product so easily is one of the incredible benefits about using Plone as a CMS. Its hard to imagine how people work in SharePoint, Drupal, WordPress, or Alfresco without such a capability.
I'll admit that I've been paying my rent in large part based on the skills that I learned back in the 80s from my Oracle Masters classes on manual normalization. But today a machine can generate a model or SQL more quickly and accurately than a human.
With frameworks like Zope and Plone out there, I'd much rather have a good object-oriented person working for me. In the end, its going to be job requirements that should drive any hiring decision, not some a priori statement. One could equally say that I'd never hire a printer who couldn't illuminate a cover page by hand.
I am reminded of my graduate statistics professor (Dr. Karl, UA) who taught us this bizarre matrix method for computing the solution to ANOVA problems. Even in matrix notation, to get an exact answer, sums of squares had to be painfully cranked out on a hand calculator. And interestingly, he never asked for an exact numeric solution, only the matrix formulation.
A year later I was hired as a post-doc at the NMSU Dept. of Horticulture to do onion karyotyping and agricultural statistics. A program named SAS was used there. It only required that I put the data in a Fortran-like data file and define the problem as a matrix solution. Exactly what I was taught. I never had to manually calculate a sum of squares--the machine did all the grunt work.
What I want in a new hire is someone who understands objects conceptually and can use whatever tools are handy to generate a data model, a needed SQL statement, or a Web-enabled form that interacts with a backend database. While its handy to have a fundamental understanding of normalization, a high level of skill in manual normalization isn't usually needed.
Now in the Zope/Plone world, my webmaster (not a Python programmer at all) can build a UML model, run the ZARGO file through Joel's web tool, and unpack the archetype in the correct Plone products folder. A trivial amount of Python is all that is needed to manually change simple things like misspelled labels, incorrect widget types, and so on.
Being able to go from UML to functional Plone product so easily is one of the incredible benefits about using Plone as a CMS. Its hard to imagine how people work in SharePoint, Drupal, WordPress, or Alfresco without such a capability.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Quarterly Amazon Stats
Its December and time for my quarterly statistics on Amazon sales ranks for Plone texts. Remember that when it comes to Amazon sales rank, big numbers mean low sales. That said, Aspeli leads the pack ever so slightly at #310,527 followed very closely by Lotze, et al. and Cooper. Pelletier and Shariff are at the top of the graph and bottom of Amazon sales rank, no doubt because of their effective direct e-distribution.
There are two newcomers to the graph: A Users Guide to Plone (Lotze, Runyan, Hasecke, Nagle) and The Definitive Guide to Plone, 2nd Ed. (Reale, McKay). The latter is due out next April and is available for pre-order. Recall my earlier post about racking up a favorable sales ranks by coordinating pre-orders.
By way of comparison with other CMS, VanDyk's Pro Drupal Development has a sales rank of #8,385. Mercer's book comes in with #15,746.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Practical Plone Preorders
I was looking at Jon Stahl's recently uploaded slide deck for non-profits and noticed his plug for Practical Plone 3. That jogged my memory and I went back to YouTube and tracked down Jon's "Online Social Networks: Can They Power Social Change?" video, a one-hour collection of lightning talks.
Sure enough, presentation #4 was Alex Steffen's and he tells a tale of marketing his organization's book. The video is a little rough and it takes awhile to get to the fourth talk, so I've extracted the audio channel for those who like immediate gratification.
The gist of the matter is that Amazon's algorithm for sales rank includes all pre-orders as part of the first day's total sales. That means a significant number of pre-orders can elevate a book very, very high on the lists. Alex used social networking to organize a pre-order campaign and the result was that the book rolled out with an Amazon sales rank of 500 followed soon after by 38,000(!) copies being ordered.
Of course, this means we should run right over to Amazon and pre-order Practical Plone 3. The only problem is, the book is not yet available on Amazon. We're left with pre-ordering directly from the Publisher, our good friends at Packt.
I'm not sure how Packt-published books make it into Amazon's system, but it seems like a good idea to follow Steffen's example and pile up the pre-orders on Amazon as soon as its available. I'd appreciate hearing from someone closer to the publishing process regarding the feasibility of this strategy and when/if we might see pre-ordering available on Amazon for the new edition of Practical Plone.
Sure enough, presentation #4 was Alex Steffen's and he tells a tale of marketing his organization's book. The video is a little rough and it takes awhile to get to the fourth talk, so I've extracted the audio channel for those who like immediate gratification.
The gist of the matter is that Amazon's algorithm for sales rank includes all pre-orders as part of the first day's total sales. That means a significant number of pre-orders can elevate a book very, very high on the lists. Alex used social networking to organize a pre-order campaign and the result was that the book rolled out with an Amazon sales rank of 500 followed soon after by 38,000(!) copies being ordered.
Of course, this means we should run right over to Amazon and pre-order Practical Plone 3. The only problem is, the book is not yet available on Amazon. We're left with pre-ordering directly from the Publisher, our good friends at Packt.
I'm not sure how Packt-published books make it into Amazon's system, but it seems like a good idea to follow Steffen's example and pile up the pre-orders on Amazon as soon as its available. I'd appreciate hearing from someone closer to the publishing process regarding the feasibility of this strategy and when/if we might see pre-ordering available on Amazon for the new edition of Practical Plone.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Developer Community Growth
Tom (twrichar) asked the other day, "does anyone have any statistics on how the Plone DEVELOPER community may be growing, hopefully over a (recent), multiyear span?" There is one recent answer to this quesion: Chris Calloway's code swarms. They are a terrific way to visualize movement in the community. The code_swarm project page at Google explains what the video is displaying.
But if someone is interested in numbers, here are two that I've got. In October through November, 2007 I counted 45 participants in the Core Developers forum on Nabble. Repeating the exercise today for the interval 23 Oct. through 23 Nov. 2008, we find 75 core developers who have actively posted. That's a 60% increase in a year.
Other stats that I've been watching include the number of sites listed on Plone.net, which is now up to 1420.
The graph shows a very linear trend. At this rate we'll break the 2000 sites barrier before the end of 2009.
The fact that we have linear growth belies some statements I've seen by observers of the CMS scene who think that Plone has passed its peak and may be becoming a niche player (sorry, can't recall the exact citation).
Another metric of interest, also from Plone.net, is that the number of providers listed there has increased from 225 last March to 287 today. That's a 28% increase in 6.5 months.
I've also been tracking Plone releases. I've plotted them such that, for example, version 3.1.4 is placed at 3.14. That means major releases have ten times the weight of minor releases and bug fixes have ten times less weight than minor releases. My guess is that minor releases should have more weight.
At any rate the graph at left shows the zigs and zags of releases, where there is on-going support for one version (for example, 2.5) while another major release takes off (3.x).
The regression line has a slope of 0.001, which means there is 1/1000th of a major release per day. Taking the inverse, we have 1000 days (2.7 years) per major release.
This picture is complicated by the fact that 2.5 was clearly a major release. If we elevate 2.5 to major release status, it basically doubles the slope, changing release frequency to 1.4 years per major release.
But if someone is interested in numbers, here are two that I've got. In October through November, 2007 I counted 45 participants in the Core Developers forum on Nabble. Repeating the exercise today for the interval 23 Oct. through 23 Nov. 2008, we find 75 core developers who have actively posted. That's a 60% increase in a year.
Other stats that I've been watching include the number of sites listed on Plone.net, which is now up to 1420. The graph shows a very linear trend. At this rate we'll break the 2000 sites barrier before the end of 2009.
The fact that we have linear growth belies some statements I've seen by observers of the CMS scene who think that Plone has passed its peak and may be becoming a niche player (sorry, can't recall the exact citation).
Another metric of interest, also from Plone.net, is that the number of providers listed there has increased from 225 last March to 287 today. That's a 28% increase in 6.5 months.
I've also been tracking Plone releases. I've plotted them such that, for example, version 3.1.4 is placed at 3.14. That means major releases have ten times the weight of minor releases and bug fixes have ten times less weight than minor releases. My guess is that minor releases should have more weight.
At any rate the graph at left shows the zigs and zags of releases, where there is on-going support for one version (for example, 2.5) while another major release takes off (3.x).The regression line has a slope of 0.001, which means there is 1/1000th of a major release per day. Taking the inverse, we have 1000 days (2.7 years) per major release.
This picture is complicated by the fact that 2.5 was clearly a major release. If we elevate 2.5 to major release status, it basically doubles the slope, changing release frequency to 1.4 years per major release.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
World Plone Day After-Action Report
As regular readers of this blog know, 7 Nov. was World Plone Day. If you hosted a WPD event, but haven't sent in your summary results, please go over to the spreadsheet at Google Docs and fill in your data. Thanks in advance.
Below is a draft press release that captures what we've learned so far from self-reported events.
Below is a draft press release that captures what we've learned so far from self-reported events.
With 66% of the event sites reporting in, the first World Plone Day can claim success. Friday 7 November was World Plone Day, a coordinated worldwide series of meetups, seminars, and workshops. Events were scheduled from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Hanoi, Viet Nam with a healthy representation in North America and Europe. Truly an international day of Plone, 30 countries on five continents were involved.Thanks to everyone for their participation and enthusiasm.
Plone is a ready-to-run, open source content management system that is built on the powerful and free Zope application server. Plone is easy to set up, extremely flexible, and provides you with a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities, web sites, extranets and intranets.
Forty of the 61 registered venues have reported in, showing a total of 982 participants who listened to 107 presenters. Extrapolating to those sites that have yet to record their guest count, perhaps 1500 participants world wide were engaged in learning about Plone. Over 40 companies sponsored events throughout the globe, which were sanctioned by the not-for-profit Plone Foundation, the legal owner of the Plone codebase, trademarks, and domain names.
Activities ranged from small, informal gatherings with ad hoc presentations to large, formal sessions with a half dozen presentations, refreshments, and door prizes. Brasilia, Brazil had the largest event with 128 attendees. Events were tied together in more than enthusiasm for Plone--live blogging, Twitter, and streaming video were all used to interconnect participants.
World Plone Day is anticipated to become an annual event to advocate the benefits of using Plone in education, government, non-profit/non-governmental organizations, and business. For more information, contact the Plone support lists.
Friday, November 7, 2008
World Plone Day
WPD 2008 is here at last. In Albuquerque we're hosting an open house at our facility. Very informal with folks just dropping by, asking questions, and seeing what the system can do. Eleven attendees this morning (10:00 until noon). I'm expecting a fellow with a Python-external database problem to drop by later.
Meanwhile, there's a lull in the action, so I'll break for a quick bite. Twittering at http://twitter.com/Schlepp.
A few more post-lunch visitors made for a total of 14 attendees. Topics today ranged widely:
On the last point we built a quick-and-dirty UML class diagram in ArgoUML, ran it through Joel's web engine, and had an archetype in no time.
One very good question we were asked was, "What else is Plone besides a CMS?"
Meanwhile, there's a lull in the action, so I'll break for a quick bite. Twittering at http://twitter.com/Schlepp.
A few more post-lunch visitors made for a total of 14 attendees. Topics today ranged widely:
- Comparing Plone with IBM's commercial CMS and JBoss
- Plone for scientific and mathematical computing
- Need for a corporate Python-Plone wiki and mailing list
- Use of Plone by CIA, FBI, NASA, and other USG agencies
- External RDBMS synchronization
- Software management repositories and sharing them through Plone
- Automatic code generation
On the last point we built a quick-and-dirty UML class diagram in ArgoUML, ran it through Joel's web engine, and had an archetype in no time.
One very good question we were asked was, "What else is Plone besides a CMS?"
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Whew!
Relief! What roller-coaster ride this election has been. Now its over and Obama is the next Prez. Can't imagine what would have happened in Chicago if he'd lost--125,000 depressed, suicidal Democrats turned loose on the streets.
Astonishment! The conspiracy theorists were wrong and the Powers That Be didn't steal the election. Americans have completely repudiated the last 8 years. Of course, it would have been a lot less painful if they'd done it in 2004. And the world would be a completely different place (for the better) if Gore had won in 2000.
With yesterday's election behind us, now is the time for new beginnings.
We have executed the first line of the computer algorithm for getting one's self out of a hole: we have stopped digging.
Programmed in Python it might look like this:
Now on to World Plone Day!
Astonishment! The conspiracy theorists were wrong and the Powers That Be didn't steal the election. Americans have completely repudiated the last 8 years. Of course, it would have been a lot less painful if they'd done it in 2004. And the world would be a completely different place (for the better) if Gore had won in 2000.
With yesterday's election behind us, now is the time for new beginnings.
"Hello, this is the United States Government technical support. Have you tried rebooting?"For the first time in years I can feel proud in something that we as a nation have done... together. I can stop "eating bitter."
We have executed the first line of the computer algorithm for getting one's self out of a hole: we have stopped digging.
Programmed in Python it might look like this:
from previousAdmin import war, civilLiberties, globalFinances
def exitHole(self):
Obama.elect(self, nation)
try:
war.reset('Iraq', 'Afghan')
civilLiberties.reset('habeus_corpus', 'Geneva_convention')
globalFinances.reset(self, 401k)
else:
print "Oh, my good god!"
Now on to World Plone Day!
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Drupal -- Plone -- DotNetNuke
I've been playing around with a logo for the blog and came up with this. It also might be useful for the Plone Metrics and Statistics group over at OpenPlans. It does occur to me that its a repurposing in part of the Plone logo, so I should check with the Plone Foundation about the proper way to handle this.Today's topic is the Packt Publishing Awards now that the overall winners have been announced. Something doesn't seem quite right. The logic of the matter goes like this:
- In the non-PHP category Plone was first, dotCMS was second, and DotNetNuke was third. Thus, Plone ranks higher than DotNetNuke.
- In the PHP category, its Drupal > Joomla! > CMS Made Simple.
- In the overall category, it turned out Drupal > Joomla! > DotNetNuke.
Curious.
From the inconsistency in the results, we can't compare Plone with Drupal and Joomla!. How can Plone be ranked simultaneously both higher and lower than DotNetNuke?
The answer may lie in the fact that the Packt voting process separates the votes for each category. I would suggest that DotNetNuke fans voted well in the overall category and then forgot to punch in also for the non-PHP category. Does this mean DotNetNuke voters haven't noticed that their favorite CMS isn't PHP based? Or perhaps Plonistas only voted in the non-PHP category and didn't go to the overall section.
But then there's another factor at work here: Packt judges used an undisclosed method in addition to the popular vote to rank the contenders. I have no idea how number of Packt titles (Drupal 9, Joomla 9, DotNetNuke 3, Plone 3), sales figures, and so on might influence the judges. One might expect that the Packt Awards are foremost meant to benefit Packt by selling more books. In the absence of a public, objective methodology and with the inconsistent ranking of Plone and DotNetNuke, one can only guess.
Whatever the actual phenomenon, it points out that one can take these kinds of popularity contests only so far. Yes, we can now market Plone as the top non-PHP CMS for 2008 and that has a certain cachet. And I'll admit I was thrilled to see Tuesday's result roll in.
But deep down, it isn't popularity that should guide your software choices. True, highly popular systems will likely have more consultants, a larger professional base, and possibly a longer useful life. But that doesn't guarantee that the popular use-case is going to match your use-case. Other requirements need to be factored in--your internal support capabilities, deployment platform, user environment, security, overall goals, and many other needs.
In my case, our predisposition for Python and the need for a secure system were the key factors that drove us to Plone. The National Vulnerability Database lists ten records for Plone over the last three years. Drupal shows 158 records; Joomla! 265. Or put another way, "...it's striking that three [Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress] of the Top Ten contenders on IBM's security worry-list have PHP in common. You can read whatever you want to into that, I suppose." (Kas Thomas, 8/2008)
For me, that's the end of the voting.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Plone Takes Packt Prize
Plone has taken top honors in Packt Publishing's 2008 Best Other Open Source CMS category. "Other" refers to non-PHP CMS. Extensibility, support for non-functional requirements, and ease of setup were key to Plone's success.
Plone surpassed the other finalists, dotCMS, DotNetNuke, mojoPortal, and Umbraco, to come away with a $2000 first prize. Thank you, Packt!
The overall CMS winner will be announced this Friday Oct. 31 (Halloween).
Monday, October 27, 2008
Congratulations, Martin!
Packt Publishing rolled out its inaugural 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valuable People list today. Martin Aspeli of the Plone Community carried the flag for Plone. From the Packt MVP list:"I am just amazed at his contributions from writing code, writing a book on Plone Development, answering questions on the mailing list."Congratulations to all the hard-working MVPs on all the systems. This is truly a remarkable affirmation of all that Open Source can be.
"His tireless development for the project, his support in the mailing lists/forums, and his documentation for the project not only on plone.org"
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Plone Events
Jean Jordaan had a posting over on plone.user inquiring how to estimate the size of the Plone community. I've dug through the Events archive at Plone.org and put together a table summarizing all the sprints, conferences, and symposia since Jan. 2003. I'm still missing attendance data, so anyone who knows how many Plonistas turned up at a particular event, please update the spreadsheet.
Below is a graph that shows the cumulative number of events over time. It seems to have a nice 2nd order polynomial curve to it. The breakdown by year is:
Below is a graph that shows the cumulative number of events over time. It seems to have a nice 2nd order polynomial curve to it. The breakdown by year is:
| 2003 | 6 |
| 2004 | 6 |
| 2005 | 9 |
| 2006 | 11 |
| 2007 | 12 |
| 2008 | 11 |
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Plone Indicators
Last March Jeff Whatcott put together an insightful set of graphics for Drupal. Some of these stats have been watched on this blog, but there are some new ones. Someone over at the Plone boards on Nabble suggested that the Plone community do the same. Here goes...
How Often Do People Search for Plone on Google?
Plone = blue, Drupal = red, Wordpress = green, Joomla = orange
Back in 2003, Plone was the leader of the (very small) CMS pack. Search volume has been declining since mid-2005. 2006 was a good year for Plone in the news.
How Often Do People Mention Plone on Twitter?
There have been no tweets recently. (Curious, because I saw conference tweets in DC.)
How Often Do People Mention Plone on Blogs?
Posts that contain Plone per day for the last 30 days.
How Many Job Postings Mention Plone?
However, when compared with other heavy-hitter CMS...
How Do Plone Jobs Pay?
(Gotta figure out what Blogger is doing to my table styles!)
How Well Do Plone Books Sell on Amazon?
Please see my earlier post.
How Often Do People Search for Plone on Google?
Plone = blue, Drupal = red, Wordpress = green, Joomla = orange
Back in 2003, Plone was the leader of the (very small) CMS pack. Search volume has been declining since mid-2005. 2006 was a good year for Plone in the news.
How Often Do People Mention Plone on Twitter?
There have been no tweets recently. (Curious, because I saw conference tweets in DC.)
How Often Do People Mention Plone on Blogs?
Posts that contain Plone per day for the last 30 days.
How Many Job Postings Mention Plone?
However, when compared with other heavy-hitter CMS...
How Do Plone Jobs Pay?
(Gotta figure out what Blogger is doing to my table styles!)
| Python Developer | $88,000 |
| Product Developer | $72,000 |
| Web Developer Net | $69,000 |
| QA Test Analyst | $74,000 |
| Computer Programmer | $54,000 |
| Application Development Manager | $104,000 |
| Senior Information Architect | $86,000 |
| Linux Engineer | $88,000 |
How Well Do Plone Books Sell on Amazon?
Please see my earlier post.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
CMS-476 Database Design
Its the final evening of my College of Santa Fe Computer-Math Science 476 class. That's the Database Design class for non-traditional (evening and weekend) students. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm able to take their UML modeling skills and use them to create a Plone product in a single evening. A series of screencasts is up on YouTube describing the process (start with Part B and then chase down the others, C through to G).
The exercise was met with very positive responses from the students. A couple of them will actually be implementing something in Plone in their day-jobs. For example, a student who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Emergency Operations Center learned of a former student who has already created an archetype for EOC equipment inventory. Looks like a great fit.
Also, here's the news on Packt's open source awards from Nate Aune:
Vote for Plone in the "Best Other Open Source CMS" award
Spread the word - here is a news item about the awards on Plone.org
See the other finalists for the Best Overall Open Source CMS award:
See the other finalists for the Best Other Open Source CMS award:
Thanks for supporting Plone!
The exercise was met with very positive responses from the students. A couple of them will actually be implementing something in Plone in their day-jobs. For example, a student who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Emergency Operations Center learned of a former student who has already created an archetype for EOC equipment inventory. Looks like a great fit.
Also, here's the news on Packt's open source awards from Nate Aune:
In case you hadn't heard already, Plone has been nominated for the
"Best Overall Open Source CMS" and the "Best Other Open Source CMS"
categories in the Packt Publishing CMS awards and is now a finalist.
If you haven't voted already, please do it now! The voting ends on
Oct. 20, so there are only 5 days remaining to cast your vote.
Vote for Plone in the "Best Overall Open Source CMS" award
Vote for Plone in the "Best Other Open Source CMS" award
Spread the word - here is a news item about the awards on Plone.org
See the other finalists for the Best Overall Open Source CMS award:
See the other finalists for the Best Other Open Source CMS award:
Thanks for supporting Plone!
Thursday, October 9, 2008
World Plone Conference 2008
The Conference has been going well and I've had a good time making new connections, renewing acquaintances, and learning lots about Plone. Even if only one session per day was stellar, these Plone Conferences would be worth the time and money. The trouble is, there are lots of stellar sessions each day.At left Limi talks about his vision for where the Plone user experience is heading. I've also attended very worthwhile talks by Joel Burton, David Glick, Calvin Hendryx-Parker, and a fascinating Birds of a Feather session about Cooperation and Collaboration as a Business Model.
Tomorrow I'm looking forward to Clayton Parker's Buildout talk or Burton's KSS talk (oh, no! a conflict). There's also a potential conflict between Lawrence Row's SQLAlchemy session and Nate Aune's multimedia talk.
Probably over lunch Friday Nate and I will catch up with Mark Corum and discuss Plone marketing ideas, strategies, and a path forward.
Meanwhile on the general CMS news front, Infoworld has a piece referenced by Yahoo! IT news about Acquia and Drupal.
One thing jumped out at me, this item:
You'll still need to have hardware already set up with PHP, MySQL (or PostgreSQL), and a Web server, such as Apache. Don't underestimate the work to get this running -- especially in a large production setting. It took me about a day to set up and troubleshoot this stack on my Windows Server 2003 server.Ye gods! Downloading the Plone Windows installer takes longer than running it and then you've got an out-of-the-box, fully functioning Plone instance on any Windows machine you want. But a full day to configure the stack for Drupal?! My students in my database design class at the College of Santa Fe install Plone and create a fully featured custom data type from a UML class diagram in a single class session.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Theming Plone 3, Day 2
Just finished Joel Burton's excellent intensive two-day mini-course on Theming Plone 3. Good stuff. Learned tons about many, many intricacies of 3.1. This is critical as we need to upgrade our many existing 2.5 sites and start implementing new portals with the most recent technology.
Leslie Molecke from the City of Albuquerque web portal team had recommended Joel's bootcamps. They took his training last year and it was extremely helpful. Take a look at http://www.cabq.gov/albuquerquegreen for some of their handiwork.
Having been through a mini-bootcamp now, I can recommend it (or better still, the full-length version) to anyone working in Plone. Even dyed-in-the-wool Pythonistas are guaranteed to learn
something about the way Plone skins and themes its pages. Seems like every hour, even if the topic was elementary CSS, I learned several useful tidbits. Worth every penny, assuming that pennies have any worth after this week's market crashes.
Meanwhile, its 7:30 EDT here at the hotel and I'm taking a break from grading papers for Database Design. Too bad the Pentagon City Marriott is so far from the Plone Conference social evening up at the Science Hall near Dupont Circle. Have to miss this one.
Tomorrow the 2008 Conference begins and it looks to be full of great talks and tutorials. I'll be looking for Nate Aune and Mark Corum to discuss Plone marketing, statistics, metrics, and advocacy.
Nate sent me a fairly recent link I'd missed -- http://www.waterandstone.com/resources.html as well as pointers to a couple of his pages -- http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-marketing/metrics-and-statistics and http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-marketing/metrics. More on these as I have time to digest them.
Leslie Molecke from the City of Albuquerque web portal team had recommended Joel's bootcamps. They took his training last year and it was extremely helpful. Take a look at http://www.cabq.gov/albuquerquegreen for some of their handiwork.
Having been through a mini-bootcamp now, I can recommend it (or better still, the full-length version) to anyone working in Plone. Even dyed-in-the-wool Pythonistas are guaranteed to learn
something about the way Plone skins and themes its pages. Seems like every hour, even if the topic was elementary CSS, I learned several useful tidbits. Worth every penny, assuming that pennies have any worth after this week's market crashes.
Meanwhile, its 7:30 EDT here at the hotel and I'm taking a break from grading papers for Database Design. Too bad the Pentagon City Marriott is so far from the Plone Conference social evening up at the Science Hall near Dupont Circle. Have to miss this one.
Tomorrow the 2008 Conference begins and it looks to be full of great talks and tutorials. I'll be looking for Nate Aune and Mark Corum to discuss Plone marketing, statistics, metrics, and advocacy.
Nate sent me a fairly recent link I'd missed -- http://www.waterandstone.com/resources.html as well as pointers to a couple of his pages -- http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-marketing/metrics-and-statistics and http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-marketing/metrics. More on these as I have time to digest them.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Plone Bootcamp
I'm sitting in Joel Burton's Theming Sites with Plone 3 Bootcamp ahead of the 2008 World Plone Conference. Looks to be a good thing targeted for my needs, moving from 2.5 to 3.1.First thing this morning as I was wandering more or less lost, jetlagged and tired through the Ronald Reagan Center a pleasant fellow in a Plone t-shirt asked if he could help me find someplace. I said, "Oceanic B" and he introduced himself as Joel and directed me to the nearby classroom. An auspicious start. At left, Joel discusses working with TAL, one of those things that I can do, but not particularly well.
For the morning, there has been a healthy amount of review, but also the beginnings of the 3.1 way of doing things. There have been a few cool tricks, too. Using http://127.0.0.1 in one tab and http://localhost in another let's me be logged on as site manager in one tab and be an anonymous user in another. No more Firefox for admin and IE for a test user.
The new style portal_view_customizations is also a key concept. The portal_view_customizations defaults to the Registration view and customized items are highlighted in yellow. The non-obvious need to explicitly click on the Contents tab before deleting a totally hozed object is a good tip to remember. Additionally, the use of portal_types to specify alternative templates was a good piece of information--even for us dinosaurs running 2.5 sites.
Caught a glimpse of Limi in the hallway. In a brief 10-second exchange he reports that San Fran is good (doesn't miss all the snow in Norway) but that he needs to work on the balance between Google and Plone.
More tomorrow regarding the second day of class and then on to the Conference proper on Wednesday.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Success and Failure
This morning I came across a pleasant article online by Tom O'Malley in the CSM Opinion section. Being that Plone Metrics is all about measuring Plone, a few quotes from O'Malley will be instructive.
That immediately brings to mind another metric for Plone: the size of its non-profit community. Plone.net shows 241 non-profit sites out of 1366 total or about 18%. That's a remarkable way in which Plone gives back to the community, by helping the not-for-profit with their outreach.
Here's the graph of the growth of Plone.net sites showing its very linear trend line. It should reach 2000 by the end of January 2010.
...it's important to remember that ideas on success vary, even in these enlightened times.
The trouble is, America becomes the land of numbers and the higher the number, the greater the success.
The lessons of failure are an important part of the curriculum of success. We learn from them. They push us to do better; they teach us humility.
True success is giving something back. And you don't have to have a lot in the wallet to attain it. There are many people, young and old, who give back by serving in literacy campaigns and soup kitchens.
That immediately brings to mind another metric for Plone: the size of its non-profit community. Plone.net shows 241 non-profit sites out of 1366 total or about 18%. That's a remarkable way in which Plone gives back to the community, by helping the not-for-profit with their outreach.
Here's the graph of the growth of Plone.net sites showing its very linear trend line. It should reach 2000 by the end of January 2010.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Statistics and Politics
You'll excuse me for yet another political diversion. Yesterday I ran across an old friend at lunch and in the few moments we spoke, he brought up a powerful image that summarized Sarah Palin's political experience. He said that Palin as VP was like the major of Portales, NM (pop. 9,000 like that of Wasilla) getting 18 months as NM governor and then saying he or she was ready for the #2 job in the country.
This sort of imagery isn't a statistical comparison. Its an analogy and they have a way of strongly connecting with our approximate number sense. The New York Times today has a piece about "Gut Instinct" and our two number senses, one approximate and one symbolic, precise, and abstract.
While I'm a big fan of the latter, many people respond more, let us say, viscerally to the former. That's probably why anecdotal evidence is given such heavy weighting in decision making. And that can lead to some bad decisions.
These sort of poor decisions are also made when corporate and institutional criteria out-weigh end-user criteria. All too often institutional decision makers forget to even ask their end-users what their needs and requirements are. The result is a set of tools for the business that meets the IT department's convenience, but ignores the job to be done by the user community.
My best all time example is our company's use of Mass-11 as a corporate word processing standard when Word Perfect was available back in the late 80s. Talk about standardizing on a suboptimal solution.
So the lesson learned is to think end-user requirements and be objective. Find measures for the software and systems decisions you make and don't rely on that easily fooled approximate number sense. Don't hop on the Joomla train because its the next cool thing--have a reason and a measure.
This sort of imagery isn't a statistical comparison. Its an analogy and they have a way of strongly connecting with our approximate number sense. The New York Times today has a piece about "Gut Instinct" and our two number senses, one approximate and one symbolic, precise, and abstract.
While I'm a big fan of the latter, many people respond more, let us say, viscerally to the former. That's probably why anecdotal evidence is given such heavy weighting in decision making. And that can lead to some bad decisions.
These sort of poor decisions are also made when corporate and institutional criteria out-weigh end-user criteria. All too often institutional decision makers forget to even ask their end-users what their needs and requirements are. The result is a set of tools for the business that meets the IT department's convenience, but ignores the job to be done by the user community.
My best all time example is our company's use of Mass-11 as a corporate word processing standard when Word Perfect was available back in the late 80s. Talk about standardizing on a suboptimal solution.
So the lesson learned is to think end-user requirements and be objective. Find measures for the software and systems decisions you make and don't rely on that easily fooled approximate number sense. Don't hop on the Joomla train because its the next cool thing--have a reason and a measure.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Connexions Makes the NY Times
Just a quick post to point out that Connexions, the wonderful Plone-based repository of online learning material, has been the topic of a significant article in the New York Times today. Give it a read and visit the site.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Hurricane Ike Impacts Plone
You might wonder how a hurricane can have any effect on software. In this case, its the Plone infrastructure that's getting hammered. Hurricane Ike, a strong Category 2 storm, is set to strike the Texas gulf coast near Houston late tonight into early tomorrow. It has a huge wind field and is pushing a large storm surge ahead of it.
Enfold Systems, a key player in the Plone world, is based in Houston. Alan Runyon, one of the co-creators of Plone, is President. I had my first (and only) Plone training course in Houston, taught by Cameron Cooper. Enfold produces great produces like their Desktop and of course Enfold Server. They've been a great resource.
Now the forecast is for Ike to bring with it storm surges of up to 30' in upper Galveston Bay and along the Houston Ship Canal. Galveston Island may be completely under water. I hope everyone has evac'ed from low-lying areas in the southeast side of the city and gotten the windows boarded up or shuttered in. Good luck, everyone.
Enfold Systems, a key player in the Plone world, is based in Houston. Alan Runyon, one of the co-creators of Plone, is President. I had my first (and only) Plone training course in Houston, taught by Cameron Cooper. Enfold produces great produces like their Desktop and of course Enfold Server. They've been a great resource.
Now the forecast is for Ike to bring with it storm surges of up to 30' in upper Galveston Bay and along the Houston Ship Canal. Galveston Island may be completely under water. I hope everyone has evac'ed from low-lying areas in the southeast side of the city and gotten the windows boarded up or shuttered in. Good luck, everyone.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Anecdotal Evidence and Hybrid Solutions
As much as I promulgate requirements-based thinking and cold-hearted analytics when it comes to choosing software and IT tools, its nice to be surprised some times. On a conference call this afternoon where we were discussing a new Plone portal with the core group, one of the participants for whom we'd built a previous site said, "Its a great tool... a fantastic tool." To which another Plone customer in the group agreed with a simple, "Amen."
That said, the conversation then turned to the issue of portals being "only as strong as the weakest member in the group." This was in reference to using Plone to cure the e-mail blight that is crushing everyone's inbox. All it takes is one person to refuse to use the portal technology and everyone falls back to the good old standby, e-mail.
These portals are interesting hybrids. In one case we link to WebEx in order to have remote desktop application sharing between model developers. This has worked very well even for low bandwidth partners in the Middle East.
Also, with our Corporate internal portal solution locked in on SharePoint, we find it convenient to leave the sensitive internal material on a SharePoint portal. A link from the external Plone site takes users with suitable credentials into the more restricted area. This way we rely on Corporate computer security systems around the SharePoint site, but still have easy access to open material within Plone, which does all the heavy lifting for our international partners. Similarly, the Plone site has a customized skin for project branding and identification. The SharePoint sites can remain with their default look-and-feel.
One curious SharePoint gottcha reported during the telecon was the need to repeatedly re-enter one's SecureID credentials as one moved to new pages. Since each SecureID password is valid for only one authentication, SharePoint users were constantly firing up their SecureID cards, entering their PINs, and then typing the strong password that was generated. Secure, yes, but also very painful. Must have something to do with how our VPN is authenticating their session.
Just three and a half weeks to the 2008 Plone Conference. If you haven't made arrangements, time is running out. Looking forward to it, although Corporate travel put me up in a hotel across the river--I'll be taking the Metro everyday. See you there.
That said, the conversation then turned to the issue of portals being "only as strong as the weakest member in the group." This was in reference to using Plone to cure the e-mail blight that is crushing everyone's inbox. All it takes is one person to refuse to use the portal technology and everyone falls back to the good old standby, e-mail.
These portals are interesting hybrids. In one case we link to WebEx in order to have remote desktop application sharing between model developers. This has worked very well even for low bandwidth partners in the Middle East.
Also, with our Corporate internal portal solution locked in on SharePoint, we find it convenient to leave the sensitive internal material on a SharePoint portal. A link from the external Plone site takes users with suitable credentials into the more restricted area. This way we rely on Corporate computer security systems around the SharePoint site, but still have easy access to open material within Plone, which does all the heavy lifting for our international partners. Similarly, the Plone site has a customized skin for project branding and identification. The SharePoint sites can remain with their default look-and-feel.
One curious SharePoint gottcha reported during the telecon was the need to repeatedly re-enter one's SecureID credentials as one moved to new pages. Since each SecureID password is valid for only one authentication, SharePoint users were constantly firing up their SecureID cards, entering their PINs, and then typing the strong password that was generated. Secure, yes, but also very painful. Must have something to do with how our VPN is authenticating their session.
Just three and a half weeks to the 2008 Plone Conference. If you haven't made arrangements, time is running out. Looking forward to it, although Corporate travel put me up in a hotel across the river--I'll be taking the Metro everyday. See you there.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
September Amazon Statistics
Time again for my quarterly analysis of Amazon stats for Plone books. This go-round Aspeli has bounced back from over 200,000 to 18,000. This position is better than any period since March. Remember that decreasing Amazon rank means increased sales volume.
Back in June I said:
With this sudden up-turn, I'd be inclined to think that six months after the Plone 3.0 release and the publication of Professional Plone Development everyone who needed the book has bought it. Come back in Sept. and we'll see if this is a fluke or a continuing trend.Looks like it was a fluke or the summer doldrums. Sometimes its nice to have to eat your words.
CMS book sales continue to be brisk. I see that Mercer's Drupal book is in the top 1000 (654) and VanDyk & Buytaert's second edition is rated at 1379. One Drupal text is now available for the Kindle.
Speaking of the Kindle, searching Amazon's Kindle Store for "Plone," one finds Magnus Lie Hetland's Beginning Python. I wonder what the Plone-Kindle market is? Please comment if you read this blog and own one.
I applied my "weighted sales rank" algorithm (1/sales rank * 106) as a proxy for sales volume and see that Aspeli accounts for roughly 82% of Plone book sales. Cameron Cooper comes in at 9.3% followed by the smattering of the others. Remember that a large number of Plone books sales may not be tracked due to e-publishing (Plone Live and Plone CM Essentials) and availability online (A User's Guide to Plone).
Once again I'll beat the drum for the Plone community to buy books, review books, write books.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Bossies and a Political Diverimento
InfoWorld's Bossies (Best of Open Source Software Awards) came out recently. The format is a terribly kludgy slide show, but if you persevere, you'll eventually figure out who got which awards.
Elgg garnered the best social networking tool. MediaWiki took the wiki top spot. WordPress was given blog honors. To my surprise they had an object database category, but they passed over Zope and went with db4o. Under content management (hidden in the Enterprise Application supercategory) Alfresco came away with the prize.
No mention of runners up, scoring, methodology, but they do accept nomenations from the public at large. Apparently they are already accpeting nominations for next year. Their website mentions some of their criteria:
And now for some political statistics...
In the wake of the Democratic National Convention here in the U.S., today I'd like to putz around with some polling statistics. Prof. Tanenbaum (Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and author of MINIX) maintains a wonderful electoral vote website full of fascinating polling data and an always-insightful daily commentary.
I've been following with interest his Electoral College graphs, which compare the 2004 campaign with what is unfolding right now in 2008. Although at times McCain has pulled close (and even ahead prior to last June), one thing that struck me was how little "noise" there was in the 2008 graphs compared with the jittery 2004 ones.
Tanenbaum classifies polling data as strong, weak, barely in favor of one candidate or another or else tied. In this case I ignored his "barely" and "tied" columns. Somewhat similar results occur if "barely" is added in, but beware, that means you are using statistically insignificant differences for scoring.
Armed with csv files with the relevant data from Tanenbaum's site, I did some curve fitting and see that my eyes were not deceiving me. The best-fit polynomial curves for the 2004 data had R2 values of 0.44 (Democrats) and 0.49 (Republicans). Using 2008 data has R2 values of 0.89 (Democrats) and 0.22 (Republicans).
R2 is the regression coefficient and is a measure of how well the line matches the observed data. A value near 1.0 means the line's equation fits extremely well, while a value near zero means that the equation has little power to explain the data. In this case I used a 5th order polynomial model (6th order for GOP 2008). Adding in the "barely" polls ups the GOP R2 to 0.83, so it appears that much of the noise in the data is cancelled by including so-called battleground states.
Conclusion--Obama's polling numbers are very stable with much less variability than McCain's. If I were McCain, I'd be worried. But then go back to Electoral-Vote.com next week--it may all have changed. These polynomials explain variability in the data, but they aren't predictive.
Elgg garnered the best social networking tool. MediaWiki took the wiki top spot. WordPress was given blog honors. To my surprise they had an object database category, but they passed over Zope and went with db4o. Under content management (hidden in the Enterprise Application supercategory) Alfresco came away with the prize.
No mention of runners up, scoring, methodology, but they do accept nomenations from the public at large. Apparently they are already accpeting nominations for next year. Their website mentions some of their criteria:
Our selection committee is looking for innovation, functionality, ease of use and implementation, and a proven track record in serving the needs of businesses. The deadline for submitting nominations for the 2009 Bossies is June 26 [2009], and the winners will be announced August 3.
And now for some political statistics...
In the wake of the Democratic National Convention here in the U.S., today I'd like to putz around with some polling statistics. Prof. Tanenbaum (Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and author of MINIX) maintains a wonderful electoral vote website full of fascinating polling data and an always-insightful daily commentary.
I've been following with interest his Electoral College graphs, which compare the 2004 campaign with what is unfolding right now in 2008. Although at times McCain has pulled close (and even ahead prior to last June), one thing that struck me was how little "noise" there was in the 2008 graphs compared with the jittery 2004 ones.
Tanenbaum classifies polling data as strong, weak, barely in favor of one candidate or another or else tied. In this case I ignored his "barely" and "tied" columns. Somewhat similar results occur if "barely" is added in, but beware, that means you are using statistically insignificant differences for scoring.
Armed with csv files with the relevant data from Tanenbaum's site, I did some curve fitting and see that my eyes were not deceiving me. The best-fit polynomial curves for the 2004 data had R2 values of 0.44 (Democrats) and 0.49 (Republicans). Using 2008 data has R2 values of 0.89 (Democrats) and 0.22 (Republicans).
R2 is the regression coefficient and is a measure of how well the line matches the observed data. A value near 1.0 means the line's equation fits extremely well, while a value near zero means that the equation has little power to explain the data. In this case I used a 5th order polynomial model (6th order for GOP 2008). Adding in the "barely" polls ups the GOP R2 to 0.83, so it appears that much of the noise in the data is cancelled by including so-called battleground states.
Conclusion--Obama's polling numbers are very stable with much less variability than McCain's. If I were McCain, I'd be worried. But then go back to Electoral-Vote.com next week--it may all have changed. These polynomials explain variability in the data, but they aren't predictive.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Plone and Teaching Database Design
In six weeks to the day I'll be hopping a flight to Washington National for seven days of Plone-ness. I've got my slot at Joel Burton's workshop for Mon-Tues, plan on attending the entire 2008 Conference on Wed-Fri, and finish it off with the weekend sprints. I'll get a chance to hook up with Jason, our Python guru who left Sandia two years ago and is now esconced in DC. Should be an excellent week.
Meanwhile, on to today's topic: teaching database design. My CMS-476 class at the College of Santa Fe begins on Wednesday and I have 12 students. Four seniors, three juniors, a single sophomore, and four freshmen round out the class, so I'll have a wide spectrum of experience and IT backgrounds.
Normally, one would consider a database design class to be strictly a design class: ER diagrams and that sort of thing. However, in the single 8-week term at my disposal, I feel like I owe to my students to give them a very, very solid database foundation and skills that will pay the rent.
What does that mean? Well, I start out with the wherefore and why of databases--an assignment for them to spend a day of "database fasting," trying to get through a day without directly using a database (for example, online banking, phonebook, e-mail contact lists, ATM, TV channel guide, and strictly speaking, a computer's file system). I point out the types of databases--hierarchical, relational, and object-oriented--with examples--a computer's file system, a MySQL database, and Zope.
While I spend a portion of every class going over SQL in detail, working from simple to complex statements, I also introduce them to database modeling. I start with the Formal Object-Relational Modeling Language (FORML), now embedded in Visio, which gets them used to using tools to generate ER diagrams and schema.
But nowadays I quickly move on to UML and that means I have an opportunity to teach them how class and state diagrams can quickly generate archetypes in an object-oriented framework. We implement a custom Plone data type from the UML via Joel Burton's online ArchgenXML tool. By that evening's end, we've gone from conceptual model and requirements through to fully integrated, web-enabled data system.
It definitely opens minds and I hope that eventually it opens doors for them. I encourage other database instructors to use Plone and Zope as a model of state-of-the-art object-oriented information management in their classrooms. Providing students with tools to not only design their databases but implement them in a web environment gives them a very valuable toolset, even in a relatively short course.
Meanwhile, on to today's topic: teaching database design. My CMS-476 class at the College of Santa Fe begins on Wednesday and I have 12 students. Four seniors, three juniors, a single sophomore, and four freshmen round out the class, so I'll have a wide spectrum of experience and IT backgrounds.
Normally, one would consider a database design class to be strictly a design class: ER diagrams and that sort of thing. However, in the single 8-week term at my disposal, I feel like I owe to my students to give them a very, very solid database foundation and skills that will pay the rent.
What does that mean? Well, I start out with the wherefore and why of databases--an assignment for them to spend a day of "database fasting," trying to get through a day without directly using a database (for example, online banking, phonebook, e-mail contact lists, ATM, TV channel guide, and strictly speaking, a computer's file system). I point out the types of databases--hierarchical, relational, and object-oriented--with examples--a computer's file system, a MySQL database, and Zope.
While I spend a portion of every class going over SQL in detail, working from simple to complex statements, I also introduce them to database modeling. I start with the Formal Object-Relational Modeling Language (FORML), now embedded in Visio, which gets them used to using tools to generate ER diagrams and schema.
But nowadays I quickly move on to UML and that means I have an opportunity to teach them how class and state diagrams can quickly generate archetypes in an object-oriented framework. We implement a custom Plone data type from the UML via Joel Burton's online ArchgenXML tool. By that evening's end, we've gone from conceptual model and requirements through to fully integrated, web-enabled data system.
It definitely opens minds and I hope that eventually it opens doors for them. I encourage other database instructors to use Plone and Zope as a model of state-of-the-art object-oriented information management in their classrooms. Providing students with tools to not only design their databases but implement them in a web environment gives them a very valuable toolset, even in a relatively short course.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Visualizing CMS
I'm still working on quantifying this, but here are some screen captures of website visualizations from http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/. Fun stuff. The colors are coded as follows:
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags
Finding the black root node in these small images can be tricky. Look for a starburst of grey nodes with no further daughter nodes and then go upstream.
From top to bottom they are:
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags
Finding the black root node in these small images can be tricky. Look for a starburst of grey nodes with no further daughter nodes and then go upstream.
From top to bottom they are:
- Drupal.org
- Plone.org
- Wordpress.org
- Joomla.org
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
CMS at SourceForce Community Choice Awards
The results are in from the latest SourceForge Community Choice Awards. OpenOffice and phpMyAdmin did well in the winners circle, but there's a back story among the also-ran.
Finalists for the Best Project category included Drupal and XOOPS. Best Project for the Enterprise finalists included Drupal. Best Project for Educators finalists included Drupal and Moodle. Finalists in the Most Likely to Change the World category also included Drupal. Best New Project included ImpressCMS. In the satirical category Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation, Moodle was a finalist. And surprisingly, Drupal was a finalist in the Best Tool or Utility for Developers category.
One has to remember that this is a self-reporting survey of sorts, which instantly biases the results. However, the SourceForge Awards do attract a lot of media attention--I saw the announcement of the winners in a Yahoo!News item.
Remember that Plone moved off of SourceForge and now uses LaunchPad in order to avoid U.S. export control issues. That said, SourceForge ostensibly opened the competition to all open source, whether hosted on SF or not. I have a hypothesis that all the finalists are SF-hosted. When I get a minute later today, I'll drill down and see if that's true.
Meanwhile, the Packt Publishing Open Source CMS Awards are open for nomination. Plone has done well here in the past and, importantly, there is a cash prize. Get over to the Packt site and vote for Plone.
Finalists for the Best Project category included Drupal and XOOPS. Best Project for the Enterprise finalists included Drupal. Best Project for Educators finalists included Drupal and Moodle. Finalists in the Most Likely to Change the World category also included Drupal. Best New Project included ImpressCMS. In the satirical category Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation, Moodle was a finalist. And surprisingly, Drupal was a finalist in the Best Tool or Utility for Developers category.
One has to remember that this is a self-reporting survey of sorts, which instantly biases the results. However, the SourceForge Awards do attract a lot of media attention--I saw the announcement of the winners in a Yahoo!News item.
Remember that Plone moved off of SourceForge and now uses LaunchPad in order to avoid U.S. export control issues. That said, SourceForge ostensibly opened the competition to all open source, whether hosted on SF or not. I have a hypothesis that all the finalists are SF-hosted. When I get a minute later today, I'll drill down and see if that's true.
Meanwhile, the Packt Publishing Open Source CMS Awards are open for nomination. Plone has done well here in the past and, importantly, there is a cash prize. Get over to the Packt site and vote for Plone.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
CMS File Sharing
OK, the nephews have gone back to Vermont and things are settling into their normal routine here in NM. It was neat that Peter (age 16) was doing so well with his Python coding. It was really cool to introduce him to Plone. He immediately grokked how Python, Zope, and Plone open doors for online capability.
Back to Plone metrics, I've been meaning to discuss an observation I made earlier this month: who's searching for what Plone-wise. Turns out, just slightly over 20% of those who visit this blog via a Google search do so by searching for some version of "file sharing." Whether its "filesharing," "cms file sharing," "file sharing cms," "simple file sharing cms," or any of several dozen variations, its obvious that people are looking for content management solutions that help them with the basic problem of file sharing. At my day job we have several portals that do just that because Computer Security closed down all anonymous FTP. There simply isn't any easy way for projects to share their content with those outside the lab. Plone is answering that need.
Coincidentally, yesterday we met with a very senior staff member who needed a site moved off of its internal SharePoint server and placed externally on Plone. I'm always amazed when I look at a SharePoint site how limited they are. Turns out there are 1104 of them internally at Sandia. These sites certainly permit file uploads and downloads, discussions and commenting, and so on, yet they don't seem capable of fostering the growth of community--they lack personality. I'm sure there are experts out there that can make SharePoint sing, but I've yet to find the likes of plone.net/sites where the best are showcased.
Also yesterday, our neighborhood association had its summer meeting and they voted funding to upgrade our simple, no-frills Plone portal. I'll be casting about for a good deal on domain name plus professional hosting. Right now Web Faction, Nidelven, and Openia are looking good, but I'm open to suggestions and even proposals.
Back to Plone metrics, I've been meaning to discuss an observation I made earlier this month: who's searching for what Plone-wise. Turns out, just slightly over 20% of those who visit this blog via a Google search do so by searching for some version of "file sharing." Whether its "filesharing," "cms file sharing," "file sharing cms," "simple file sharing cms," or any of several dozen variations, its obvious that people are looking for content management solutions that help them with the basic problem of file sharing. At my day job we have several portals that do just that because Computer Security closed down all anonymous FTP. There simply isn't any easy way for projects to share their content with those outside the lab. Plone is answering that need.
Coincidentally, yesterday we met with a very senior staff member who needed a site moved off of its internal SharePoint server and placed externally on Plone. I'm always amazed when I look at a SharePoint site how limited they are. Turns out there are 1104 of them internally at Sandia. These sites certainly permit file uploads and downloads, discussions and commenting, and so on, yet they don't seem capable of fostering the growth of community--they lack personality. I'm sure there are experts out there that can make SharePoint sing, but I've yet to find the likes of plone.net/sites where the best are showcased.
Also yesterday, our neighborhood association had its summer meeting and they voted funding to upgrade our simple, no-frills Plone portal. I'll be casting about for a good deal on domain name plus professional hosting. Right now Web Faction, Nidelven, and Openia are looking good, but I'm open to suggestions and even proposals.
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Plone at TED
Peter Donnelly described a statistician as a person who likes numbers and figures but lacks the personality skills to be an accountant. So tonight I'll skip the numbers and do a strictly anecdotal analysis.
I was trolling the net last night and early this morning and came across a TED video on cooperation. The presenter, Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs) discusses among other things, the role of open-source software in the new economy of collaboration. Definitely worth a look.
Also in the TED collection is Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) talking about open-source economics. Good stuff.
And if you're wondering why Plone Metrics is interested in all this besides a general enthusiasm for international cooperation, then watch Richard Baraniuk's presentation on open-source education. Baraniuk is the champion of Connexions, the educational collaboration program. Connexions in turn is a Plone site. Although Plone is not specifically cited (the only technical plug is for XML in general), I'll wager it was the only CMS that formed the critical backbone of one of the TED presentations.
It may just be anecdotal and there may be another CMS-driven TED topic hidden out there, but knowing that Connexions enabled by Plone made the TED cut should be a source of pride for the Plone community and a point of reference for anyone else evaluating CMS.
(BTW, the TED website appears to be built on top of the Dojo framework, which is manifestly not a CMS but the site looks great.)
I was trolling the net last night and early this morning and came across a TED video on cooperation. The presenter, Howard Rheingold (author of Smart Mobs) discusses among other things, the role of open-source software in the new economy of collaboration. Definitely worth a look.
Also in the TED collection is Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) talking about open-source economics. Good stuff.
And if you're wondering why Plone Metrics is interested in all this besides a general enthusiasm for international cooperation, then watch Richard Baraniuk's presentation on open-source education. Baraniuk is the champion of Connexions, the educational collaboration program. Connexions in turn is a Plone site. Although Plone is not specifically cited (the only technical plug is for XML in general), I'll wager it was the only CMS that formed the critical backbone of one of the TED presentations.
It may just be anecdotal and there may be another CMS-driven TED topic hidden out there, but knowing that Connexions enabled by Plone made the TED cut should be a source of pride for the Plone community and a point of reference for anyone else evaluating CMS.
(BTW, the TED website appears to be built on top of the Dojo framework, which is manifestly not a CMS but the site looks great.)
Sunday, June 22, 2008
June Amazon Stats
Its time for my quarterly analysis of Amazon stats for Plone books. Of particular interest is that Aspeli has "dropped" from around 50,000 to well over 200,000. Remember that increasing Amazon rank means decreased sales volume.
With this sudden up-turn, I'd be inclined to think that six months after the Plone 3.0 release and the publication of Professional Plone Development everyone who needed the book has bought it.
Come back in Sept. and we'll see if this is a fluke or a continuing trend. For prospective authors, now is the time to hit the market since there's room at the top. Better still, how 'bout a second edition, Martin? Geared to 3.2?
Sunday, June 15, 2008
The Simpson's Paradox -- CMS Matrix Revisited
I've recently run up against Simpson's paradox at work and thought I'd look at some CMS stats through that lens. Its been awhile since I dug in at CMS Matrix, so let's begin there.
If you click on their internal link to the detailed statistics (thank you CMS Matrix), you'll be able to dig down into the specific ratings reported on each category from Security to Built-In Applications. With a little help of cutting, pasting, and rearranging in a simple database, one can generate a table such as the following for any CMS of the 517 or so that they have listed. (Is everyone building CMSs these days?!)
The count is just the number of responses that make up the rating. Remember, this is a self-selected, self-reporting rating system. Don't fall in love with the numbers.
At first glance one would look at the sums (Drupal = 13.38; Plone 12.47) and conclude that Drupal is the winner. But Simpson's Paradox tells us to look into the underlying data and make sure that there aren't confounding parameters. In this case, there are--the categories themselves.
If we look at the individual categories, we see that Plone outranks Drupal in 6 of 10 categories. By this reckoning, one could say that Plone is the superior CMS.
But again, to harp on my theme of requirements-driven decision making, one should consider "what you need your CMS to do" in your particular and probably unique circumstances.
Are security and flexibility your top concerns? They are at the national laboratory where I work. Commerce and system requirements rank very low in our situation--we don't "sell" anything and we have complete control over our servers--we can create any required system environment. Interoperability is a big one for us, since we develop on Windows testbeds and deploy on UNIX machines. Plone makes perfect sense.
If you are weak on Python, heavy on PHP, and can't get your ISP to install a Zope instance, you will likely find Drupal the preferred product. Of course, I'd argue that your PHP programmers could learn Python in a flash and its a far better language in terms of code maintenance and scalability, but that's a discussion for the Pythonistas to hold.
Bottom line: Requirements, requirements, requirements!
If you click on their internal link to the detailed statistics (thank you CMS Matrix), you'll be able to dig down into the specific ratings reported on each category from Security to Built-In Applications. With a little help of cutting, pasting, and rearranging in a simple database, one can generate a table such as the following for any CMS of the 517 or so that they have listed. (Is everyone building CMSs these days?!)
The count is just the number of responses that make up the rating. Remember, this is a self-selected, self-reporting rating system. Don't fall in love with the numbers.
| Category | Drupal | Plone |
| Security | 6.68 | 6.70 |
| Ease of Use | 6.20 | 6.73 |
| Management | 6.49 | 6.62 |
| Flexibility | 6.76 | 7.03 |
| Commerce | 5.67 | 5.09 |
| Sys Req | 6.70 | 5.77 |
| Support | 6.37 | 6.25 |
| Performance | 6.43 | 6.00 |
| Interop | 6.27 | 6.50 |
| Apps | 6.40 | 6.51 |
| Sum | 13.38 | 12.47 |
| Count | 215 | 101 |
| Rating | 4/10 | 6/10 |
At first glance one would look at the sums (Drupal = 13.38; Plone 12.47) and conclude that Drupal is the winner. But Simpson's Paradox tells us to look into the underlying data and make sure that there aren't confounding parameters. In this case, there are--the categories themselves.
If we look at the individual categories, we see that Plone outranks Drupal in 6 of 10 categories. By this reckoning, one could say that Plone is the superior CMS.
But again, to harp on my theme of requirements-driven decision making, one should consider "what you need your CMS to do" in your particular and probably unique circumstances.
Are security and flexibility your top concerns? They are at the national laboratory where I work. Commerce and system requirements rank very low in our situation--we don't "sell" anything and we have complete control over our servers--we can create any required system environment. Interoperability is a big one for us, since we develop on Windows testbeds and deploy on UNIX machines. Plone makes perfect sense.
If you are weak on Python, heavy on PHP, and can't get your ISP to install a Zope instance, you will likely find Drupal the preferred product. Of course, I'd argue that your PHP programmers could learn Python in a flash and its a far better language in terms of code maintenance and scalability, but that's a discussion for the Pythonistas to hold.
Bottom line: Requirements, requirements, requirements!
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Source Forge 2008 Community Choice Awards
OK, I know Plone has moved from SourceForge to LaunchPad.net, but its that time of year--the time when every Plonista needs to hop over to SourceForge and nominate their favorite open-source projects for the Community Choice Awards. I personally nominated Plone for Best Project, Best for Educators, and Most Likely to Change the World. Perhaps the Plone for Educators buildout should be used for the Best for Educators nomination, so feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts and nominations can be coordinated.
Friday, June 6, 2008
NTEN Report
As Jon Stahl pointed out over at Nabble, the Nonprofit Technology Network published its 2008 CMS Satisfaction Survey (see the link at the bottom of his post--thanks, Jon). Today I'm going to look at their CMS Adoption data (pg. 9).
Please don't take this too seriously, since the sample size isn't terrifically large (but congrats to NTEN for getting so much data). As Jon pointed out, this is a self-reporting survey, so it is anything but random.
Here are the columns for all organizations irrespective of size (measured by budget):
"Other" comes out clearly at the head of the pack with Drupal a distant second and Plone/Joomla! leading the peloton at 8%. Let's now look at the values for small organizations (budgets under $500K):
"Other" is still on top with 21% and Drupal is still seated in second, but both Plone and Joomla! at 15% have pulled away from the peloton (<9%).
For large organizations we find:
If one looks at medium-sized organizations (no need for another chart, trust me) ,"Other" once again tops the list with everyone else far below in the pack. Drupal is now fourth, Plone sixth, and Joomla! sinking to ninth.
What can we conclude from this? Here's the graph of all the data, including the medium-sized organizations:
Among large, well funded nonprofits, "other" (which may frequently mean home-built), far and away is reported more often that any of the other titles.
At small nonprofits, "other" along with Plone, Drupal, and Joomla! fare roughly equally well.
In between, at medium-sized organizations, "other" and Drupal top the ranks.
Another way to look at this is to combine large and medium org percents (M+L) and compare that score against the small org number.
Now Plone and Joomla! move to the top of the list, which is to say their numbers fell off most sharply as one moved from small to medium and large organizations. One might conclude that Plone and Joomla! are best suited for situations where there is little money to spare, whether for installation, licenses, training, customization, or IT in general. Drupal and "other" are then favored when there is a larger org with presumably more disposable income to spare on CMS.
But without a doubt, the biggest lesson from all this is that open source is very strong within the not-for-profit community.
Please don't take this too seriously, since the sample size isn't terrifically large (but congrats to NTEN for getting so much data). As Jon pointed out, this is a self-reporting survey, so it is anything but random.
Here are the columns for all organizations irrespective of size (measured by budget):
| Count | Percent | |
| Other | 216 | 29% |
| Drupal | 114 | 15% |
| Plone | 62 | 8% |
| Joomla! | 59 | 8% |
| Convio_CMS | 52 | 7% |
| Antharia | 49 | 7% |
| Blackbaud | 47 | 6% |
| iMIS | 26 | 4% |
| Kintera_Sphere_CMS | 26 | 4% |
| ImpressCMS | 20 | 3% |
| WordPress | 18 | 2% |
| Ektron | 14 | 2% |
| Custom | 14 | 2% |
| XOOPS | 13 | 2% |
| Convio_PageBuilder | 12 | 2% |
| CrownPeak | 11 | 2% |
| TOTAL | 754 |
"Other" comes out clearly at the head of the pack with Drupal a distant second and Plone/Joomla! leading the peloton at 8%. Let's now look at the values for small organizations (budgets under $500K):
| Count | Percent | |
| Other | 43 | 21% |
| Drupal | 40 | 19% |
| Joomla! | 31 | 15% |
| Plone | 31 | 15% |
| Antharia | 16 | 8% |
| WordPress | 10 | 5% |
| XOOPS | 10 | 5% |
| ImpressCMS | 9 | 4% |
| Blackbaud | 4 | 2% |
| Convio_CMS | 2 | 1% |
| Custom | 2 | 1% |
| Kintera_Sphere_CMS | 2 | 1% |
| Convio_PageBuilder | 1 | 1% |
| CrownPeak | 0 | 0% |
| Ektron | 0 | 0% |
| iMIS | 0 | 0% |
| TOTAL | 210 |
"Other" is still on top with 21% and Drupal is still seated in second, but both Plone and Joomla! at 15% have pulled away from the peloton (<9%).
For large organizations we find:
| Count | Percent | |
| Other | 87 | 31% |
| Convio_CMS | 35 | 12% |
| Blackbaud | 26 | 9% |
| Drupal | 20 | 7% |
| iMIS | 14 | 5% |
| Plone | 13 | 5% |
| Antharia | 13 | 5% |
| Kintera_Sphere_CMS | 12 | 4% |
| Joomla! | 11 | 4% |
| Convio_PageBuilder | 9 | 3% |
| CrownPeak | 9 | 3% |
| Ektron | 7 | 3% |
| ImpressCMS | 6 | 2% |
| Custom | 4 | 1% |
| WordPress | 1 | 0% |
| XOOPS | 1 | 0% |
| TOTAL | 283 |
If one looks at medium-sized organizations (no need for another chart, trust me) ,"Other" once again tops the list with everyone else far below in the pack. Drupal is now fourth, Plone sixth, and Joomla! sinking to ninth.
What can we conclude from this? Here's the graph of all the data, including the medium-sized organizations:
Among large, well funded nonprofits, "other" (which may frequently mean home-built), far and away is reported more often that any of the other titles.At small nonprofits, "other" along with Plone, Drupal, and Joomla! fare roughly equally well.
In between, at medium-sized organizations, "other" and Drupal top the ranks.
Another way to look at this is to combine large and medium org percents (M+L) and compare that score against the small org number.
| M+L | Small minus M+L | ||
| Count | Percent | Percent | |
| Joomla! | 25 | 5% | 9% |
| Plone | 28 | 6% | 9% |
| Drupal | 65 | 14% | 5% |
| XOOPS | 1 | 0% | 5% |
| WordPress | 6 | 1% | 4% |
| Antharia | 23 | 5% | 3% |
| ImpressCMS | 11 | 2% | 2% |
| Custom | 10 | 2% | -1% |
| Convio_PageBuilder | 9 | 2% | -1% |
| CrownPeak | 10 | 2% | -2% |
| Ektron | 12 | 3% | -3% |
| Kintera_Sphere_CMS | 21 | 5% | -4% |
| iMIS | 24 | 5% | -5% |
| Blackbaud | 34 | 7% | -5% |
| Convio_CMS | 42 | 9% | -8% |
| Other | 142 | 31% | -10% |
| TOTAL | 463 |
Now Plone and Joomla! move to the top of the list, which is to say their numbers fell off most sharply as one moved from small to medium and large organizations. One might conclude that Plone and Joomla! are best suited for situations where there is little money to spare, whether for installation, licenses, training, customization, or IT in general. Drupal and "other" are then favored when there is a larger org with presumably more disposable income to spare on CMS.
But without a doubt, the biggest lesson from all this is that open source is very strong within the not-for-profit community.
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