The Plone Metrics' Number of the Year

Remember last year:  "Therefore, be it resolved that I shall post to Plone Metrics at least monthly in 2014."  Not exactly an epic failure, but only 50% success.  I hereby grant myself resolution absolution.  (Thanks for the concept, Over the Hedge.)  At least I've turned the corner on frequency of Plone Metrics blog posting. 

Now having retired from the Labs, I expect that frequency of posts will be on the rebound even further. It's amazing how a day job gets in the way of fun volunteer projects. 

Now on to the main event.  Here are the past winners.

2013	Elizabeth Leddy
2012	Martijn Pieters
2011	Toby Roberts
2010	Eric Steele
2009	Nate Aune
2008	Joel Burton
2007	Alexander Limi

With this table comes the usual disclaimer:  Plone Metrics Person of the Year is in no way officially affiliated with Plone or its Foundation, but represents my personal effort to thank the whole community.  Of course, there are many, many contributors that are well-deserving of a tip o' the hat:

• The core developers and release managers definitely need a huge round of applause for all the essential work they do.  
• The 2014 Plone Conference team and sponsors. The return to Bristol emphasized Plone's world-wide appeal.  Bucharest, we're coming!  
• All of those who have blogged and microblogged about Plone are another group of supporters who contribute simply by continuing to communicate your ideas, thoughts, and solutions along with the occasional pieces of humor.  
• As always, the Foundation Board gets a great big nod of appreciation here.  Paul Roeland in particular deserves a shout-out as our President.

There has been some movement on the OpenHub leaderboard with Hanno Schlichting holding the all-time top spot, but "Other" at the head of the pack for the year to date.  Martijn has held his place in the Stack Overflow stats.  The number of contributors is healthly, especially considering that we're coming up on a major release.

Along those lines I should point out that Plone still ranks highly at CMS Matrix.  Plone remains in the top 10 whether sorting the huge CMS Matrix list by clicks, views or compares. This is the same ranking as last year. 

Clicks	10th
Views	7th
Compares	7th

But back to the question at hand, who is Plone Metrics' Person of the Year?  When the call went out for suggestions, Steve McMahon came back with an eminently suitable suggestion:  instead of a person, let it be a number.  This year, '2020' is the Plone Metrics' Number of the Year.  

2020 is five years off.  We're at the cusp of 2015 and version 5.0.  Plone is mature, stable, highly regarded.  We've never had a "Drupalagedon."  Where will we be in five years?  

Let the discussion begin. 

Here's the chart of our release frequencies, although I didn't plot all the 4.0x series minor releases.  I count version 2.5 as a major release (normalized version 3.0), so you can see that everything after that is nominally incremented by one in the y-xis.  The legend displays proper canonical major versions.

Major releases are more prolonged, meaning their utility lasts longer and .  Without curve fitting and regression, one can see that we're on track for finishing up the 5.x series sometime in 2018-19.  By 2020 Plone 6.0 should be in beta or better.  Life is good. 

In closing, congrats to everyone in the Plone community.  Thanks for all the great work you do to make the CMS I formerly used in my day-job such a solid one.  Now as a docent for the Albuquerque Botanic Garden, I get to use Plone at their site at http://www.cabq.gov.  See you in 2015 in Bucharest (if I don't make it to Sorrento first).