Plone Metrics

Plone Metrics Person of the Year

2011-12-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

Just like every year, outstanding contributions have been made from a large number of Plonistas worldwide. It's been a eventful year for Plone and that makes 2011's throwdown especially difficult. 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 that makes the Plone ecosystem tick.

Noteworthy contributions during 2011 that deserve a shout-out include, but are not limited to:

The 2011 Plone Conference people aka bunny ears (and panda hats) did a great job with this year's event. I notice that Elizabeth Leddy, the energizer bunny of the conference, and probably some others, are missing from the Thank you page.
All of those who have blogged and microblogged about Plone are another group of supporters who contribute simply by communicating your ideas, thoughts, and solutions. Thanks to Planet Plone for pulling so many blogs together.
Along those lines, Marc Corum, even thought he has stepped down from the Plone Board, is pushing to re-energize the Plone Communication and Marketing Teams.
The core developers and release managers definitely need a huge shout-out for all the essential work they do.
There continues to be some local Albuquerque talent in this year's nominees: Michael Bernstein (helping out at with our Chem Security site) and Alex and Chantal at FosterMilo.
As always, the Foundation Board gets a great big nod of appreciation here. Calvin Hendryx-Parker, past-Prez, gets my admiration just for wearing the shiny pants.

This leaves me with a terrible burden--coming up with the one and only best of the best, the single Plone Metrics Person of the Year. Casting about for some stats to back up my decidedly unscientific process leads me to the following two tables.

Table 1. Core Developers and number of postings

Andreas Jung (ajung)	5549
Alexander Limi	2760
Espen Moe-Nilssen (espen)	1310
Martin Aspeli	1296
Jon Stahl	1257
Alex Clark (aclark)	981
Laurence Rowe	879
Graham Perrin	871
redcor	848
Mayank Patel (monks)	607
Dale DeWitt	589
George L	549
John Destefano (deesto)	486
JonStahl	464
Israel Saeta Pérez	443
Kees Hink	415
Mikko Ohtamaa	373
Eric Steele (esteele)	356
Vincent Fretin	356
Nate Aune (natea)	349

These are the top 20 people in the Core Developers forum as ranked by postings. It strongly argues for Andreas Jung to win the prize. He's been contributing right through the holidays, not even slowing down for Festivus. If I hadn't been tipping the Aberfeldy 12-year tonight, I'd go look at the number of commits each of these have contributed in the past year, but for now, number of posts on the forum will do.

Table 2. Plone Foundation Board Members and Advisers with number of terms served.

Alexander Limi*	7
Toby Roberts	6
Geir Bækholt	5
Joel Burton*	5
Jon Stahl	4
Matt Hamilton	4
Steve McMahon	4
Mark Corum	3
Nate Aune*	3
Paul Everitt	3
Calvin Hendryx-Parker	2
Darci Hanning	2
Geoff Davis	2
Roberto Allende	2
Xavier Heymans	2
Alan Runyan	1
Andy McKay	1
Ben Saller	1
Bernard Bühlmann	1
Jacqueline Arasi	1
Jodok Batlogg	1
Mark Barrenechea	1
Munwar Shariff	1
Robert Boulanger	1
Sam Greenblatt	1
Sasha Vinçic	1

* Previous Plone Metrics Person of the Year

When I compiled a listing of all the past year's Board members, I was not surprised to see Alexander Limi at the top of the list. What amazed me is that Toby Roberts is in the number two spot. He has been the unsung hero, serving as Treasurer for every year except 2004 (when Matt Hamilton had the job). I presume he is doing the job this year, although I don't see it on the 2011-12 Foundation page.

Based on the above two tables, I'm going to toss a coin (heads: Andreas; tails: Toby). Both have significantly contributed to Plone, both in 2011 and in the long haul.

And this year's winner of a free beer from me, is (drum roll, please)... Toby Roberts.

Just remember, Toby may be today's Plone Metrics Person of the Year, but each day every one of the members of the Plone community are winners. And you all have my thanks.
_______________
The author welcomes comments that commend others involved with Plone. This brief blog post can't do justice to all the hard and creative work that's being done throughout the year.

2011 Year in Review

2011-12-28T09:52:00.000-08:00

It's very nearly the end of the year, which is probably why I'm listening to "Driving the Last Spike" by Genesis off their I Can't Dance album. So here's a wrap-up of Plone Metrics for 2011.

I'm always surprised when I go back and look at my posts, realizing what was a newsworthy item at the time. But if you reflect on last year, you'll recall that in January the Arab Spring was upon us. Plone.org users among thousands of others from Egypt were blocked when Mubarak shut down the country's Internet. Continued unrest in the region has meant that many have had to turn to services like TeleComix to access the Web.

Besides the political, there were natural disasters, foremost of which was the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The impact of that event was readily visible in the stats from Google Analytics when I compared March 2010 with 2009. Below, the red arrow indicates the Fukushima Prefecture, which to this day is hard hit by the continuing radiological drama.

In between those two events, the Cioppino Sprint took place. One notable result was the migration of Plone.net over to Plone.org. The result, as one might expect, was the complete loss of traffic (and a boost over at Plone.org). As you can see, the drop-off was nearly instantaneous.

Amazon sales rank statistics were continued to be tracked for Plone books, although my quarterly schedule broke down. Life happens. In February the annual Great Backyard Plone Count was carried out.

In July Plone Metrics chopped through CMS Matrix in an effort to see how things stood with Plone's standing in that venue. Even admitting the flaws in a self-reporting and hence biased compendium like CMS Matrix, the results for Plone were very positive. Plone scored 97% of all features listed.

In September an inquiry raised in a LinkedIn forum led to a summary that in many ways captures Plone's strengths. It's always gratifying to be able to respond to someone's questions with point-by-point material that addresses matters concretely.

November saw the San Francisco Plone Conference, a tremendously successful event. There was tweeting in abundance but no live blogging from me. Following up on that, Plone Metrics took a lighthearted look at the Plone Conference attendance numbers earlier this month. That in turn led to Lennart Regebro's insightful analysis.

The only thing left is the annual New Year's Eve posting of the Plone Metric's Person of the Year. This is the fifth year for this annual shout-out to the community. Now accepting nominations--please feel free to comment with your suggestions on who is the best of the best.

Plone Conference 2011 by the Numbers

2011-12-03T19:40:00.000-08:00

And an exercise in "scientifically" locating the 2012 conference.

The numbers are in and San Francisco looks like this against the last five Plone Conferences.

Location	Attendance
2011 San Francisco	265
2010 Bristol	285
2009 Budapest	420
2008 Washington	350
2007 Naples	415
2006 Seattle	258

With Naples and Budapest looking so good, one is tempted to say that Europe is the more successful venue. I ran a Student's t-test in order to see if the two sample populations, Europe and North America, were significantly different. The null hypothesis is that there is no difference between the European and North American conference attendance numbers.

For the data above with a standard deviation of 65.1 and 4 degrees of freedom for the test, the t value was -1.55. The probability of this result, assuming the null hypothesis, is 0.196. This does not meet the usual 0.05 value for significance. We accept the null hypothesis that Europe and North America are the same.

World Plone 2012

The call for proposals for the 2012 Conference is out. Let's see what sort of trouble we can get in with the above table.

First, turn the cities into latitude and longitude coordinates, then calculate the average of all six venue locations weighted by attendance. The result looks like this:

The red 'X' indicates the location of the weighted average, the spot that maximizes attendance while minimizing travel costs. It's the perfect location for next year's conference.

There's only one problem... the actual location is in the middle of the North Atlantic:

The nearest land is either St. John's, Newfoundland or the Madeira Islands. St. John's has an October-November average high temperature of 6-11 C (43-51 F) and the remarkable beverage, Newfoundland Screech. Apparently, some of the best food in Canada is to be found there, plus I like snowshoeing.

Madiera, on the other hand, has an average Oct-Nov high temperature of 20-23 C (68-73 F) and a famous wine named after the island. One of the conference centers in Funchal looks suitable.

I urge the Plonistas in Newfoundland and Labrador along with those in Madiera to submit proposals.

"Quarterly" Amazon Stats

2011-11-19T13:01:00.000-08:00

I'm at bit tardy on my Amazon sales rank summary -- should've had one out in August. No matter, here's the graph. Remember that with sales rank, lower values are better.

In general all Plone books are trending upwards, which is not unexpected considering that the Plone 3 titles are being replaced by Plone 4 ones. Martin Aspeli's Professional Plone 4 Development tops the chart so to speak with a sales rank of 156K with de Alba close behind. Plone Live once again is in the basement (at the top of the chart), but that is more likely due to its heavy reliance on non-Amazon sales channels.

The table of the current titles and their sales ranks are given in the table below. Of interest this time is the column on sales/yr. I found a graph that illustrated the approximate Amazon sales rank function, which turns out to be a power law. A little regression with Open Office Calc gave me an equation of

f(x) = (1.3*10^6) * (x^-1.1)

This equation has numerous potentially huge sources of error, but I thought it would be interesting to toss it out and let the authors themselves reflect on the results. Please note that these are Amazon-only numbers. Because most titles are published by Packt, this almost certainly is a small fraction of total sales.

Amazon Page Rank Stats	*November 2011*

Title	Author	Sales rank	Sales/yr	Rating
Professional Plone 4 Development	Aspeli	156,335	150	4.50
Plone 3 Intranets	de Alba	192,392	120	4.00
Plone 3 Theming	Williams	704,159	29	5.00
Professional Plone Development: Plone 3	Aspeli	692,760	30	4.67
A User's Guide to Plone 4	Nagle et al.	755,217	27	n/a
The Definitive Guide to Plone (2nd ed)	Delmonte, et al.	984,891	20	1.00
Building Websites with Plone	Cooper	1,050,568	19	3.71
Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook	Giménez & Romero	1,270,629	15	4.00
Practical Plone 3	Knox et al.	1,025,403	19	4.80
The Definitive Guide to Plone (1st ed)	McKay	1,239,686	16	4.14
Plone 3 for Education	Rose	1,722,143	11	4.00
A User's Guide to Plone: Updated for Plone 3	Lotze & Nagle	1,773,374	11	3.00
Plone Content Management Essentials	Meloni	1,801,775	10	3.11
Content Management with Plone: Handbook	Lotze& Theune	1,954,272	10	n/a
Plone 3 Multimedia	Gross	2,833,640	6	3.67
Plone Live	Pelletier	2,886,475	6	4.80

I'd like to find out what actual sales numbers are directly from authors, but only if you don't consider it SBI, "sensitive business information".

LinkedIn Questions

2011-09-10T09:23:00.000-07:00

This from a posting in the Plone group on LinkedIn:

In a nutshell, where are you seeing Plone used the most right now? (Not geographically, though I guess that would be interesting too.) What kind of companies are using it, and for what? What tool is Plone kicking to the curb? Where do you think the growth potential is for it to grow in popularity? (Is it competing with Drupal and Joomla?)
Also, given the rash of hacks that have been in the news of late, how secure is Plone?
Thanks in advance to any who are willing to help educate me.

There were lots of great replies over in LinkedIn, but the same questions are probably asked by many others who don't get over there. So here's my spin on an answer that pulls in some of my favorite metrics.

Where is Plone used? Since the questioner seperately asks about geography and types of companies, I assume we're talking about functional domain. The Real Story Group provides a useful subway map of content management systems. Plone (located in the lower left corner) lies at the intersection of three major lines: web content management, portals and content integration, and collaboration and social software. This is a unique location for an open-source CMS.

Click on the image for a larger version.

Geographically? As a proxy I'm using the locations of Plone.org site visitors as visualized with Google Analytics. Plone is used world-wide, although it's most commonly found in Europe (47%) and North America (27%). Asia struggles in with 13%, South and Central America with 8%, Oceania with 3%, and Africa with 1.6%. Plone has one of the strongest i18N capabilities of any major CMS.

What kind of companies are using it? From Plone.org we can track down a large sample of self-reported sites that use Plone that are conveniently categorized by type of company (61 of them, no less). Non-profits, government, and education top the list, but 44% are grouped into "Other," each with less than a 3% share of the pie. As was pointed out in the LinkedIn replies, you can visit Sites that use Plone for the full list and lots of beautiful exemplars.

What tool is Plone kicking to the curb? In my opinion, CMS in general have made handcrafted HTML websites nearly obsolete except for special purposes. My team occasionally uses Dreamweaver for prototyping static pages to customers, then we implement the look-and-feel dynamically in Plone. In a Web 2.0 world, customers demand interactive webpages, collaborative websites, and user-generated content. Mashups are becoming the order of the day and the ability to combine web resources seamlessly is critical. Frankly, saying that you use a CMS is probably not much of a market discriminator these days--it's expected as part of today's web toolkit.

Growth potential? (Is Plone competing with Drupal and Joomla?) Plone is always being compared with Drupal and Joomla because it's an open-source CMS. But Plone has never focused on the free or low-cost mass market. Instead Plone has built up an ecosystem of professional consultants and businesses that provide the enduring value. The testimonials in the LinkedIn replies speak for themselves.

With it's fine-grain security model, powerful workflow engine, high usability, and large feature set, Plone remains one of the top CMS today. CMS Matrix shows Plone to be one of the top six most frequently compared CMS in their exhaustive listing of over 1000 systems.

Google Trends is sometimes cited in this context, but if that were reflecting true growth potential, we'd all be using WordPress. Also, not all Google searches captured by Trends represent good news. Item E below mentions a large DDoS attack against WordPress, hardly an indicator that would guarantee positive growth.

How secure is Plone? Plone continues to be the most secure of all the major CMS. The National Vulnerability Database shows Plone with only 9 issues in the past 3 years. Drupal had 232 in the same time interval, Joomla had 404, and WordPress had 127.

I hope you've enjoyed this romp through a number of statistics about Plone.

CMS Matrix -- Built-in Applications and Commerce

2011-07-09T04:11:00.000-07:00

If you've weathered this week's blog posts this far, you've seen my charts of the feature counts in CMS Matrix for ten CMSs. Those ten are the ones that are at the top of the list if you click on the "Sort by compares" tab. Besides total number of features (there are 133 of them in the matrix), I've also broken them down by the nine categories that are used to organize this large list of features. There's a graph for security, support, ease of use, performance, management, interoperability, and, with the three last shown below, flexibility (9 features), built-in applications (39 features) and commerce (9 features).

Flexibility has to do with an eclectic assortment of things: URL rewriting, user profiles, localization, and such. With Plone's strong history of multi-lingual support, it's no surprise to see it at the top. Also pegging the flexibility meter are Joomla, TYPO3, and eZ Publish. Drupal only misses one feature in this set; the others in the mid-range below 80%. Once again PHP Nuke is at the bottom.

Built-in applications consists of a dizzying list of features that cover the entire gamut of things-to-do with the Web. They range from blogging capability through mail forms to wikis. It's difficult to imagine anyone needing even a fraction of these features, but I suppose it gives you some idea of the breadth of coverage a particular CMS has in the total online space.

Once again TYPO3 and Plone lead the pack with most close behind. WordPress and eZ Publish lag a little further down and, guess who, PHP Nuke, brings up the rear.

The commerce feature set is a handful of items that are useful in an e-commerce environment: shopping cart, shipping, online payments, inventory management, etc. This is Plone's weakest area and TYPO3 (plus WebGUI) is right there at the same level. Four other CMSs are higher in this category and three are lower with two of them at zero.

Mercifully, that ends the categories from CMS Matrix. Coming up next, another look at the overall scores and some reflections on what it means.

CMS Matrix -- Management and Interoperabilities

2011-07-07T22:41:00.000-07:00

Yet another look at the CMS Matrix numbers. Yeah, I know, they're user-contributed and probably biased. Heck, I'd urge Plonistas to at least head over and add to the ratings to boost Plone scores. It only takes a few inputs to bump some of the numbers up significantly.

But even with those caveats, I think it's worthwhile to go over the numbers once in awhile to see what is shaking out in a general sense. So here we're looking at the ten most-compared CMSs and counting features--not quality, but quantity.

Here's the graph on interoperability features. Remember, we're just counting features that are a clear 'Yes' or an 'Available with Free Add-on.'

Once again TYPO3 and Plone lead the pack, this time by a large margin. Most CMSs languish in the 50-70% range except for eZ Publish, which manages to crawl into the 80% bracket. PHP Nuke drags in with a flat 0%.

Here's the graph of feature counts as percentage of total possible (only six features). Plone take the lead with TYPO3, WebGUI, and eZ Publish close behind. PHP Nuke once again is at the bottom of the heap and everyone else is in the 70-80% range.

If you missed the earlier posts, head back to the first (overall), second (security and support), and third (ease of use and performance) installments of the series and see where the earlier feature-count percentages place the top ten CMSs. Next up, built in apps (whatever that means) and commerce features. Stay tuna'd.

CMS Matrix -- Ease of Use and Performance

2011-07-05T18:44:00.000-07:00

Part III of my review of CMS Matrix stats continues with a look at their categories of "Ease of Use" and "Performance." As before, I'm looking at the top ten "most compared" CMSs on CMS Matrix. Then I'm looking at the feature counts. "No," "Limited," and "Available at extra cost" are considered negatives. "Yes" and "Free add-on" are considered postives.

Ease of use easily is grouped into three categories: those with 100% of all ease of use features (TYPO3, WebGUI, and Plone), those 50-75% in the mid-range (Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, Xoops, WordPress, and eZ Publish), and PHP Nuke lagging far below.

Clearly, there are four tiers of performance in this group of CMSs: those with 100% of all performance features (TYPO3, WebGUI, Plone, and eZ Publish), those at 60% (Joomla, Drupal), those less than 40% (Mambo, Xoops, and WordPress), and PHP Nuke, once again at the bottom of the heap.

Once again, caveat emptor, these are voluntarily supplied rating presumably from members of each CMS's community. Be sure to validate your requirements against the features of CMS Matrix and be certain you're not disregarding a candidate CMS because it is missing a feature that you don't even need.

Next, we'll look at the management and interoperability categories.

CMS Matrix -- Security and Support

2011-07-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

Here's Part II of my series on stats from CMS Matrix. Earlier I looked at the total number of features for the top ten most-compared CMSs. Today I'll share the numbers on the first two categories broken out by CMS Matrix: security and support.

From the security numbers it's easily seen that Plone and TYPO3 top the list at 100% with eZ Publish in third some distance behind. WebGUI hangs on in 4th and everyone else lags significantly. In at least one way this doesn't mirror the numbers from the National Vulnerability Database: TYPO3 shows 273 vulnerabilities in the past 3 years compared to Plone with only 7. Having a lot of security-related features doesn't mean you have air-tight security for the system itself.

The support statistics show a cluster of six CMSs at the top. The top three (Drupal, TYPO3, eZ Publish) are separated from the second three (Joomla, WebGUI, Plone) by their certification programs. The remaining four CMSs are below 80% in number of support features.

Next up, ease of use and performance. Stay tuned.

CMS Matrix Revisited

2011-07-01T21:31:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I wander over to CMSmatrix.org and check things out. Systems come, systems go, and for a handful, there's a steady maturation and growth. Tonight I took the top ten CMSs as rated by "Comparisions." Must mean something if people are usually looking at the same set of systems.

I then counted the CMS Matrix features that they lacked, as defined by a feature having a "No" or "Limited" or "Costs Extra" in a particular cell. One minus that value divided by the total number of features is given in the Pct Features column below. The "System Requirements" section was not tallied due to it's largely text content.

*CMS*	Pct Features
TYPO3 4.5.2	97%
Plone 4.0	96%
WebGUI 7.9	89%
eZ Publish 4.2	83%
Joomla 1.6.0	82%
Drupal 6.10	77%
Xoops 2.0.18	71%
Mambo 4.6.1	71%
WordPress 3.0.4	63%
PHP Nuke 6	15%

If you prefer the graphic, here's the same data set.

It's interesting to see that among top-compared CMSs in CMS Matrix, there's a surprising amount of variability. TYPO3 and Plone top the chart above 90% and the rest trail away down to 63%. Then PHP Nuke languishes at the bottom.

Perhaps tomorrow I'll dig out my copy of 'R' and see if these cluster in any meaningful way. I have the information summarized by each CMS Matrix category (Security, Support, Ease of Use, Performance, Management, Interoperability, Flexibility, Built-in Applications, and Commerce), so I'll be able to look at each section by itself in the days ahead. But one word of warning before you base a decision on these data, check the specific features you require against any candidate system. No need to throw out a possibility, if the reason is the lack of a feature you'll never use.

Plone Books and Plone Impact

2011-05-10T20:29:00.000-07:00

Amazon

A bit past due, I'm back to Plone Metrics with an update on my almost quarterly Amazon stats.

The data set continues to grow unpredictably with 13 out of 15 texts that I track reporting sales rank numbers. The spread between minimum (good) and maximum (not so much) is the largest ever, due to slow sales of Gross's specialized multimedia tome. Some values are nearly constant, while others show the inevitable decline (increase in sales rank) as Plone 2 textbooks become obsolete.

For the first time ever, there are no books below (better than) 500,000. Part of that is slow roll out of Plone 4 texts. Aspeli's latest is included, due out in June. Below is a chart showing publication numbers for each year since 2004.

Impact

I had the good fortune today to attend a workshop in Santa Fe on Measuring & Mapping Science. Many of the concepts have applicability to measures of CMS effectiveness and I'll certainly bringing these new ideas to this blog in the coming months. While many of the presentations today concentrated on tracking the network of citations in scientific publications, others brought up novel ways of looking at usage statistics.

One important distinction was that between prestige and popularity. Simply counting clicks, views, downloads, and so forth is a surrogate measure for something's popularity. But the impact of something must be measured differently to get a handle on its importance or prestige.

As a first whack at a quick-and-easy impact metric, I turned to Google Scholar to see what sort of journal citations the various CMS's are picking up. I used the top 10 CMS's from CMS Matrix with the largest numbers of compares.

The result has almost zero correlation, meaning that importance in terms of who's writing articles about Plone doesn't have any relationship to the number of comparisons CMS Matrix reports. Here Plone (red) has 1300 citations and almost 150,000 compares.

Google Scholar is just a first cut at a measure of impact--citation counts are only the first step. The context of those citations now has to be understood to learn what is a positive vs neutral or negative cite. Because Plone is a very mature CMS, in coming weeks I'll be looking for better metrics of how it has had a significant impact over the last decade in terms of driving the CMS environment by being a leader in innovation, emergent features, and usability.

Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami

2011-03-11T20:43:00.000-08:00

As with the unrest in North Africa, the effects of yesterday's disaster in Japan are felt even on Plone.org. Here's the distribution of visits to Plone.org from last year, 11 March 2010.

And here's the map of site visitors from 11 March 2011...

In the northeast of the country site visits disappeared (understandably) with only one on the west coast. Site visits picked up significantly in the south and west. Perhaps people are using Plone to develop sites that can quickly aid in the humanitarian relief effort? Google's People Finder is now available in Japanese and Ushahidi has an active site. If you have an idea for making use of Plone at this time, don't be shy.

Meanwhile, our hearts go out to the victims of this disaster.

The Great Backyard Plone Count -- 2011

2011-02-18T00:18:00.000-08:00

So the Great Backyard Plone Count for 2011 is officially off and running. Things didn't exactly start out as smoothly as I'd hoped -- got a call from the nurse at my parents' assisted living facility around 7:00 this evening. Turns out Mom had a 3-alarm gusher of a nosebleed that couldn't be controlled. While she got an ambulance ride to Presbyterian, I drove over to the hospital. To make a long story short, everyone was incredibly helpful and after some cauterization and a very strange inflatable gauze packing up the schnoz, we actually got Mom tucked back into her own bed by midnight.

Of course, that means I didn't get out copies of last year's "sightings" to their owners in time to verify that the sites are still active. It also means that I'm only now turning on the data entry form.

Even with that hiccup right at the start, if you'd like to participate, especially in getting credit for hidden or obscure Plone sites, this is your chance. Use the form below to enter information about Plone sites you are aware of, especially intranet sites that are behind firewalls. In those cases a URL is not necessary, but a site name and description would be particularly helpful. Names and personal information (e-mail, etc.) are only for internal statistical and QA use and will not be used beyond this study. The live form can also be found at:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=0AjB6ixF2SsaScHktWlJpYnBXTVpWRnJzMWhoaEU4WWc&hl=en#gid=0

The form will be open for data entry until midnight Monday the 21st. Thanks in advance. If you'd like a look at last year's data, check out the Google Docs summary sheet.

<p>Loading...</p>

As an aside, get your binoculars out and spend 15 minutes (or more) counting the birds in your own backyard. Then submit your observations to become part of an enormous citizen-scientist ornithological study.

The Great Backyard Plone Count

2011-02-15T03:02:00.000-08:00

It's that time of the year -- time for both the Great Backyard Bird Count (Plone-driven, btw) and the Great Backyard Plone Count. While the bird count is a collaborative bird-watching effort by the Audubon Society, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and Bird Studies Canada, the Plone count is a voluntary effort to collect data on the world-wide distribution of Plone-powered sites. In homage to the GBBC, the Plone count is held the same weekend, which this year is Friday 18 through Monday 21 February.

Because many Plone sites are intranets behind firewalls, they can't be located by crawling the web. This is a chance for developers, site owners, and users to stand up and be counted. It's a non-scientific, totally voluntary effort for self-reporting Plone-based web portals.

I'll be distributing portions of last year's list to respective contributors for confirmation of existing sites on Thursday. Then on Friday, the input form to the Google Docs spreadsheet will be opened up. Anyone can then submit sightings of Plone in the wild.

Although there's significant bias in a survey like this, the most value comes from tracking trends over time. This is the third annual Backyard Plone Count and as the number of yearly data points increase, we'll better be able to extrapolate from the observations.

More to come this Friday. As they say at the sushi bar, stay tuna'd...

The Security Announcement and Mobile

2011-02-08T04:04:00.000-08:00

An interesting spike turned up in the Plone.org visitor stats this past week. Although the regular visitors showed just a tiny blip, mobile usage more than doubled.

Seems that the recent security announcement got people's attention and they turned to Plone.org with their smart phones. Based on this, it would seem prudent to design mobile style sheets to pay particular attention to time-sensitive announcements. That's probably good advice for any website.

One other observation from the above figure: mobile visitors to Plone.org don't show the usual weekly pattern of general visitors. Minima are as likely to occur on a Tuesday as a Sunday for mobile. Meanwhile, general visitors show a strong dropoff on the weekends. This trend for mobile might just be random fluctuations due to the smaller number of mobile visitors, something that gets swamped by the huge number of non-mobile site users.

If you use Plone.org via a mobile device, I'd like to hear from you -- how and when do you turn to the website with your phone? Please comment.

Plone in Egypt Addendum

2011-02-02T20:09:00.000-08:00

The Internet finally came back up in Egypt today and, as part of the initial flush of activity, there were visitors to Plone.org. Welcome back, Egypt.

Plone in Egypt

2011-01-29T10:36:00.000-08:00

It might seem trivial in light of the chaotic events going on right now in Egypt, but even Plone usage statistics reflect the Egyptian national blackout on Internet services.


Location of visitors to Plone.org -- past 90 days

As is apparent from the map, Egypt sends visitors to Plone.org from Alexandria to Luxor with most of the activity centered, understandably, in Cairo.

Egyptian visits to Plone.org, 2009-10 vs 2010-11

From the number of Egyptian visits in the above graph, it can be seen that things were largely the same as this period last year until this week when the bottom fell out. Current daily visits are zero. Admittedly, Egyptians have more immediate things to worry about than theming their Plone sites.

Also, Plone.net lists a USAID ICT Portal in Egypt. The URL returns a "server not found" error. Not a surprise there, either.

Over the past month there have been significant dips in Plone.org traffic from Tunisia as well. Site visitors hit zero on five days, which has never happened for even a single day since last Ramadan (11 August).

I was pleased to see that the Telecomix News Agency (@Telecomix) has been promoting Internet access via "the old way," dial-up modem. If anyone has any bright ideas on how to help out via Plone, now's the time speak up. Maybe EC2 portals could be useful?

Meanwhile, PloneMetrics' thoughts and prayers go out to everyone in the region during these troubled times.

PloneMetrics Person of the Year

2010-12-31T09:55:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again when I peruse the events of the past year and unilaterally designate some lucky person "Plone Metrics Person of the Year." This award comes with only the promise that if the winner and I are in the same town at the same time, I'll buy them a beer.

Past winners have been:

2009	Nate Aune
2008	Joel Burton
2007	Alexander Limi

The competition has been particular stiff, with outstanding contributions from a wide number of Plonistas worldwide. It's been a eventful year for Plone and that makes 2010's throwdown especially difficult. Noteworthy contributions during 2010 that deserve a shout-out include, but are not limited to:

The 2010 Plone Conference people at Netsight, who did a great job with this year's event. Matt Hamilton's (general and host-specific) and Astra Fowden's summaries are worth their weight in gold.
The release managers for Plone 4 (Eric Steele) and 5 (Hanno Schlichting) are also high on my list. Of course, their job wouldn't be possible without the core developers and all the Plone contributors. Hats off to them all.
As always, the Foundation Board gets a great big nod of appreciation here. Gier Baekholt (2009-10) and Calvin Hendryx-Parker (2010-11) deserve special mention for shepherding the Plone community.
There is also some local Albuquerque talent among this year's nominees: Michael Bernstein (Code for America fellow) and Emily Lewis (Webuquerque sparkplug).
The Plone IRC Superstar Contest winner and runners up always deserve special praise. The final determination has still not been announced as we go to press, but this is a reminder that the IRC community is a key part of the Plone ecosystem.
In a similar vein, here's a thanks to all those blogging and microblogging about Plone. I'm particularly pleased to see diversity highlighted with a successful year of PloneChix.
Finally, Roberto Allende gets a big tip o' the hat as the champion of World Plone Day. This year André Nogueira takes over the reins as we look forward to WPD 27 April.

All that said, with this being a metrics-centric blog, I thought I'd run a few numbers and see what falls out.

As I mentioned Matt and Netsight are serious contenders. Here's chart of World Plone Conference attendance since 2006.

Bristol turned out to be right in the middle of the range and probably would have done better had the world economy been brighter. I regret missing the conference (yup, tight budget), but the high quality videos of the presentations has been a terrific resource that has softened the blow. They have placed the bar high for future conferences.

Another notable nominee for today's award is Eric Steele. Here's the graphic that shows the impact of the Plone 4 release.

Not only was there a huge spike in Plone.org visitors associated with the release, but a sustained increase of 15-20% that continues to this day. (Green dashes show pre-release trend; red dotted line represents post-release trend.)

Based on that gi-normous spike, 130% above a typical Wednesday, plus the continued bump-up in Plone visitors, the Plone Metrics Person of the Year Award for 2010 goes to Eric. By extension, this year's award goes out to all those who contributed to Plone 4 with code, testing, feedback, documentation, product upgrades, and all the myriad of details that make up a successful release. Well done, everyone!

In closing, let me paraphrase the immortal words of Bobby Flay: "So to all you awesome [Plonistas] out there, keep doing what you're doing, but ask yourself this... are you ready for a throwdown?"

Plone Mobile

2010-12-18T19:54:00.000-08:00

I've been putting together a presentation on various web metrics for the gang at my day-job. In particular, people are asking about Google Analytics. As part of that, I've been poking around in a few less frequented parts of the system and some of that has carried over to inquiries about Plone.org users. Tonight I'm going to focus on the growing mobile community of visitors.

Above is the graph of visitors using mobile devices since GA started tracking them in November 2009. The most notable feature is the incredible peak that marks the release of Plone 4.0. The aftershocks lasted two weeks.

The other significant feature is the upward trend. There is a perceptible upward slope to the number of mobile users. In fact, if we remove the Plone 4.0 spike, the regression analysis still gives us a slope of 0.13 (a new mobile visitor every seven days). The regression coefficient (R^2) is only 0.65, so there's lots of noise in the data, mostly from weekday-weekend fluctuations.

To really see the trend, compare the last month with the same period a year ago. Clearly mobile use is on the upswing.

My final note is on the distribution of mobile users. From the city-level global map of mobile visitors to Plone.org, it's pretty obvious that mobile users are world-wide. Of course, it comes as no surprise that mobile use tracks Plone.org general use, heavy in North America and Europe. But there are significant hotspots in South America, the Middle East, south and east Asia, as well as Australia and New Zealand.

IdealWare CMS Report

2010-12-09T22:03:00.000-08:00

Once again IdealWare has come out with their 2010 annual review of Plone, WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. As last year, they are one of the few software comparisons of any type to have a completely transparent methodology. Not only is the body of the report well balanced and thought out, the detailed system-by-system accounting of the subtopics that make up their category scores makes for very worthwhile reading. Tip o' the hat again.

Also like last year, I'm taking the liberty of translating IdealWare's scoring of None, Fair, Solid, Excellent into 0, 1, 2, 3. The result is the following table.

	WordPress	Joomla 1.6	Drupal	Plone
Ease of Hosting and Installation	3	3	3	1
Ease of Setup: Simple Site	3	2	2	1
Ease of Setup: Complex Site	3	3	2	2
Ease of Use: Content Editors	3	2	2	3
Ease of Use: Site Administrator	3	2	2	2
Graphical Flexibility	3	3	3	3
Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization	2	3	1	3
Structural Flexiblity	2	2	3	3
User Roles and Workflow	1	3	2	3
Community/Web 2.0 Functionality	3	2	3	2
Extending and Integrating	3	3	3	3
Security	1	2	2	3
Support/Community Strength	3	3	3	3
2010	33	33	31	32
2009*	29	27	30	29

* In 2009 only 12 categories (instead of 13) were used.

Once again there is only a small spread in the scores, about 6%, well below the 10% of 2009. All CMS's here are improving quickly. Reviewers still hold Plone's non-LAMP hosting model against it, giving it a Fair for hosting and installation. I beg to differ with them about setting up a simple site. Once the software is installed, Plone's out-of-the-box feature set solves a wide range of CMS use-cases with a minimum of fuss.

What I stated last year still stands:

"Its always nice to see good scores and the fact that Idealware chose Plone along with only 3 other serious open source systems is high praise in and of itself. Idealware should be complimented for having a transparent methodology, a relatively neutral approach, and giving good press to four worthwhile systems.

"Still, I can't stress enough that your specific, unique requirements must drive your choice for a CMS. Don't let someone else's numbers blind you to what you and your community of users need to accomplish."

I urge those shopping for a CMS to weigh the scores according to your needs and requirements. If ease of use for content contributors, SEO excellence, and security are key features, Plone clearly comes out ahead. Go ahead and cut-and-paste my table into a spreadsheet, change the values, play with different weights, and then be sure to take a test drive** before you make a deep and lasting commitment. Changing CMS in mid-stream is not a simple task--take the long view and get it right the first time.
_______________
** Try a Plone demo site of your own at Six Feet Up or request a free Plone site at Objectis.

CMS Comparison, expanded for Plone

2010-12-08T18:16:00.000-08:00

Ashleigh Davis put together a nice table for comparing Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. It seems only fair that I take that format one step further and produce an equivalent listing for Plone.

	Plone
Homepage	plone.org
About	Plone lets non-technical people create and maintain information for a public website or an intranet using only a web browser. Plone is easy to understand and use — allowing users to be productive in just half an hour — yet offers a wealth of community-developed add-ons and extensibility to keep meeting your needs for years to come.
Example Sites	Online publication: http://discovermagazine.com/ Charitable giving: http://www.oxfamamerica.org/ http://www.globalhand.org/ Government: https://www.cia.gov/ http://www.fbi.gov/
Installation	http://plone.org/documentation/manual/installing-plone http://plone.org/support/forums/setup
Ease of use	Plone requires technical expertise for advanced customization; however, it is very full featured out-of-the-box. Content contributors, editors, and readers will find Plone easy to understand and use.
Features	Blending the creativity and speed of open source with a technologically advanced Python back-end, Plone offers superior security without sacrificing power or extensibility.
Caching Plug-Ins	ZEO server (also works and plays well with CacheFu and Squid)
Best Use Cases	For web content management, portals, content integration, collaboration, social software, and enterprise content management, especially where security is a premium.

I'd appreciate comments on how to improve this summary, especially on caching plug-ins, an area where I am weak.

Plone.org, as others see it

2010-11-29T01:34:00.000-08:00

I've been working on a Google Analytics presentation for a January symposium at my day-job. That has led me to poke around a little more at the Plone.org stats there.

One relatively new feature is In-Page Analytics. It gives you as close to a heat map as you can get for free. Percentage clicks appear as small orange bubbles above each link. Interestingly, the top links for Plone.org are Downloads (26%), New Features (19%), Documentation (16%), and Home (8%). That's 69% of all clicks in just four areas.

One cute trick (at least in Firefox) is to open the site in question in another tab. The in-page bubbles are also applied in the new tab, which let's you get a better picture of the context of the statistics.

Another statistic tucked away in Analytics is the frequency of screen resolutions used by site visitors. Almost two thirds of Plone.org site visitors use one of just five screen resolutions:

1280x800	15.90%
1280x1024	14.79%
1440x900	11.75%
1680x1050	11.04%
1024x768	8.86%
	62.34%

To my surprise, 1280x800 is the most frequently used screen size. Here's a screen shot of Plone.org resized to that dimension.

Plone

Almost all of the news and upcoming events are "below the fold" at this resolution, as is the "Plone is among the top 2%..." text block. But the good news is that 69% of all visitor clicks are on screen at this resolution.

Also below the fold is the quasi-mega-menu in the footer. As Jakob Nielson recently pointed out mega-menus can be done badly, but done well (see his original March 2009 piece), they can enhance user experience, reduce scrolling, and help users find what they are looking for more easily. Just a thought...

Now let's take that same 1280x800 resolution for a stroll with some other CMS homepages.

Drupal

Although it looks complete because the 800 px "fold" breaks in a clear area, a large bulk of material (and a jam-packed quasi-mega-menu at the bottom) needs scrolling before it can be seen.

Joomla!

In some ways like the Plone site, Announcements and Community News are truncated. Curiously, there's almost 1 cm of blank background above the content header. Perhaps that's to accommodate the snazzy "Support Joomla" diagonal banner.

SharePoint

Not so bad at first glance, until you realize that the entire area in line with the lighter gray background band is a rotating set of images. The only fixed content is the lengthy and hard to scan horizontal top menu and three highlighted but unclickable headings (What People are Saying, Capabilities & Benefits, SharePointSpotlight). Download SharePoint is practically invisible in the lower right and I almost missed the little cropped thumbnails in the set of images.

The Moral of the Story
I guess the take-away lesson from all this is to test any webpage design with a variety of screen resolutions before you lock in on something suboptimal for a large number of your site visitors. Take advantage of In-Page Analytics and make sure that highly visited links are highly visible and don't require scrolling to locate. The most important things in your page should be the most important things.

Plone.org and Plone.net Tag Clouds

2010-11-21T16:40:00.000-08:00

It's certainly easy enough to generate tag clouds these days, but two places I'd not seen it were the Plone sites. So here you have it: Plone.org and Plone.net word clouds.

My method was to extract as CSV the top 500 titles from Google Analytics using their Content by Title option for each site. That was cleaned up a bit in Open Office Calc. Then it was simply a matter of copying-and-pasting all the rows into Wordle and looking for a pleasant and readable result. I used Wordle's default ceiling of 150 most frequent words.

From Plone.org:

From Plone.net:

From both of these, I'd have to say that the Plone sites are doing a very good job of covering their respective domains. Neither site has just a few terms crushing the others into the background. Frequency distribution of terms is well graded. There's a wide and useful vocabulary displayed in each graphic, indicating that all the key topics are indeed key topics.

Share and enjoy!

For the Gang in Bristol

2010-10-28T17:55:00.000-07:00

As the World Plone 2010 Conference moves into its final day (exclusive of the weekend sprints), I thought I'd type while the Plonistas in Bristol sleep. OK, it's only midnight over there, so probably no one is really asleep. You know what they say, "Sleep is for wusses."

Here's a synopsis of some of the measures that I track over here at Plone Metrics, just for discussion starters.

First off, here's the lastest Amazon Sales Rank stats. Normally I do this quarterly, but grabbing the data a month or so early won't do any harm.

Knox and Stahl continue to hold a good sales rank (low value) along with McKay and Redomino as well as McKay's Kindle version. I'll post the raw data over at the Plone Marketing site later.

The LaunchPad stats are always fun. Release 4.0.0 has already garnered 29,840 downloads of the Windows installer. An additional 4,206 downloads of vers. 4.0.1 have taken place this month since its release on the 4th. That's 34,046 downloads for Windows.

Hanno suggested adding PyPi numbers to the *nix installer numbers. That turns out to be 6,388 plus 1,010 OS X downloads for 4.0.

As always, the one set of statistics sure to raise the ire of other communities is vulnerabilities reported at the National Vulnerability Database.

	3 mo	3 yr
Plone	0	9
WordPress	2	144
Drupal	10	282
Joomla	12	484

As usual, PHP-based systems fare much worse. Over the past 3 years systems like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla have hundreds of vulnerabilities, many of them serious. Even in the last few months all three of those CMS's have had vulnerabilities with high levels of CVSS severity.

It's no wonder that Federal agencies in the U.S like the CIA, FBI, DHS, and DOE turn to Plone. Internationally, nearly 300 governmental Plone sites are listed at Plone.net. Closer to home here in New Mexico, the City of Albuquerque, Albuquerque Public Schools, and Sandia National Laboratories all use Plone.

Another qualitative way of looking at things is to look at the CMS subway map from Real Story Group (formerly CMS Reports). This is the June 2010 version. The main change is the addition of SharePoint Add-ons, which doesn't impact Plone's position at the intersection of web content management, portals & content integration, and collaboration & social software.

The main change is the addition of SharePoint Add-ons, which doesn't impact Plone's position at the intersection of web content management, portals & content integration, and collaboration & social software. By their reckoning, Drupal should more properly be over by WordPress and Fatwire where web CMS and collaboration/social software run parallel. Plone might be better served being compared with Open Text and IBM.

Blog Action Day and Plone

2010-10-05T20:33:00.000-07:00

October 15 is Blog Action Day and the topic this year is global water quality. Together with US Fund for UNICEF, they're helping to build a movement of people across the world calling on UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to accelerate the UN's work to supply clean, safe drinking water to the world's poorest populations. Several initiatives are at work:

Raise funds for water: Change.org partnered with leading organizations to enable folks to raise money to provide clean drinking water to those in need. You can directly donate through Water.org, an organization co-founded by Matt Damon. Just $25 provides clean water for a lifetime for one person.

Spread the Word: Help to spread the word about Blog Action Day 2010 across the web. Take a moment to tell your friends to sign up via email, Facebook and Twitter. The more voices that are involved in the conversation, the greater the collective impact.

What, you might ask, does any of this have to do with Plone? Turns out my oldest active Plone portal is http://waterportal.sandia.gov. It's a collaborative workspace for teams all over the world to share water data, hydrogeological models, and other information about a resource that can be a contentious regional issue. Waterportal is now over six years old, still chugging along on Plone 2.5. We have workgroups from the Middle East, Central Asia, and the United States all sharing expertise and interest in clean, safe water.

Maybe this Oct. 15 I'll do a pro bono upgrade of waterportal to Plone 3.

Change.org|Start Petition

Windows vs *nix vs OS X

2010-09-08T16:07:00.000-07:00

In response to last week's post, Wichert Akkerman pointed out that he thought the Windows installers always showed more downloads than Unix-based ones. He suggested that I dig around for the actual numbers. Never one to turn down a challenge, I extracted the numbers from Launchpad and took a look around.

Turns out, there are some anomalies. The data for 2.5.x are probably incomplete due to the changeover to Launchpad several years ago. Also, Plone 3.2.1 shows almost 700,000 downloads of the Windows installer. Plone 3.2.2 shows almost 200,00 downloads of the unified installer for *nix. If we take the data "as is," the graph looks like this with 3.2 dwarfing everything else.

If we remove the 3.2.1 and 3.2.2 data, assuming those to be some sort of outlier, the graph looks like this.

Either way, Wichert is right--the Windows installer is being downloaded 3-4 times for every download of the unified installer. Only 2.5 shows the unified installer outperforming the Windows version. BTW, OS X is always under 10%, and for most versions, under 2%.

I leave it as an exercise for the student to interpret all this. Does this mean lots of people download the Windows version to test the product before installing on a Unix box? Is Enfold Systems with it's toolset aimed squarely at Plone for Windows in the sweet spot for Plone consulting? And what is going on with downloads for 3.2.x? Your thoughts, please.

Plone 4 Released

2010-09-04T03:11:00.000-07:00

It's been a red-letter week for Plone with the release of version 4.0 on Wednesday. Typically, Wednesdays are average days at Plone.org, but this week we saw 2.5 times the normal traffic as visitors flocked to the site. Since then, site visitor loads have been 1.5 to 2 times daily averages.

Downloads for Plone 4.0 are significant also. Since this week's release, almost 6,000 downloads have been logged at launchpad.net. That's about 10% of the lifetime download total for 3.3.5.

Interestingly, the installer for Windows (.exe) is being downloaded about twice as frequently as the unified installer (.tgz) for Unix-based systems. That will probably change with time--right now people seem to be downloading to their Windows desktops and taking 4.0 for a test drive.

The press has been good for this release with CMS Report, CMS Wire, The H Open, and MacNN all running the news in English. Several foreign language press releases have turned up, too. Of course, Plone shops are spreading the word as well with Jon Stahl, Enfold (including a link to the 4.0 user's guide), and Six Feet Up getting their material out the door first.

I should reiterate Jon's note over in the Evangelism forum encouraging everyone to blog, tweet, like, digg, and otherwise spread the Plone 4 goodness. Also, thanks to Graham Perrin for pointing out the outstanding Plone 4.0 video. And in closing, a special tip o' the hat to Eric Steele and the 4.0 developers for making this release happen.

Amazon Sales Ranks for Plone Books

2010-08-11T18:06:00.000-07:00

It's been a good year so far for Plone textbooks. New titles have been rolling out steadily. Packt currently lists 10 plus a couple related titles dealing with CMS selection and Python.

I should mention that Packt has just opened the floor for nominations for their 2010 Open Source Awards. Get on over to http://bit.ly/deN0Cn and put a plug in for #Plone. You might just win the doorprize of a new Kindle.

Meanwhile, back on topic, Amazon's list of Plone books is several pages long and as usual I've mined the sales rank data.

As you can see, values continue to bounce around quite a bit. The overall trends, as one would expect, are for sale rank to get higher (fewer sales) as time passes. That's simply because people tend to buy books when they first come out, especially IT books, which have a shelf-life determined by the version of software involved.

The graph is getting pretty busy with all the authors I'm tracking. The last 3 titles (Gimenez & Romero, Gross, and de Alba) are all new since my last posting, so there is no trending information available. Stay tuned for next September's data.

Another set of statistics that I've been tracking are the BuiltWith numbers. Apparently, they sample a couple million websites and attempt to identify underlying technologies. Their 10 Aug. graph looks like this:

There's an encouraging upward trend in Plone usage, if you trust their undocumented methodology. They state that 685 of the top million websites on the Internet use Plone. They've additionally identified 5,634 other sites in a more extensive survey.

Never Underestimate the Web

2010-06-21T08:01:00.000-07:00

The unlikeliest charity is probably HeroRAT, a program that uses giant, bomb-sniffing rats in Africa to de-mine areas in Mozambique. These rats can also be trained to detect TB and are being used for that purpose in Tanzania.

They received an unexpected boost this weekend when Nicholas Kristof wrote a thoughtful NY Times column on honoring dads through supporting charity instead of commercialism. As a result their HeroRATs' program received 2,969 donations and $128,239. That far outstripped their previous 341 donations and exceeds the funding goal for the entire project. I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of those contributions came from the NYT online edition, not the dead-tree version.

Closer to home and more on-point for a Plone blog, Martin Aspeli had an unfortunate and catastrophic hardware failure. Based on a simple blog posting and making use of ChipIn for accepting donations, he was able to reach his target in just 4 hours and within 48 hours had hit 143%. (BTW, the ChipIn account is active until July 18... hint, hint.)

It's these sorts of online efforts that are redefining how charitable giving is done and allowing a new level of personal involvement and increased efficiencies. Just as the Sumatran tsunami* and Haitian earthquake revealed the power of the Web to mobilize people, we now see that its momentum continues and that the Plone community can rise to the occasion on any scale.

Kristof's piece also points out how a single bit of good online publicity can dramatically shift one's fortune. I urge everyone to participate in evangelizing Plone. Take advantage of the Plone marketing site at Co-Activate and join the Evangelism section of the forum.

_______________

* It was the fact that the newly redesigned OxFam site (done with Plone, of course) was able to process an unprecedented number of donations immediately after the disaster in the Indian Ocean basin that my team realized that Plone was stable and could scale up to handle our largest enterprise requirements. We haven't been disappointed.

Plone Rocks

2010-05-16T21:32:00.000-07:00

I saw an Amplicate tweet a day or two ago about "Plone sucks." Following up on that I found that there was "Plone rocks" side of Amplicate and quickly stumbled into a world of automated Twitter stats. Although interesting, it has some serious flaws in understanding human language, for example, the tweet "no way Drupal rocks" was counted as a positive "Drupal rocks" score just because of the literal phrase without any understanding of context.

Apparently Amplicate has only been around since October 2009, so there's not much data to go by, but still it was interesting to poke around.

As you can see the rocks and sucks trends are roughly even. This is actually good news because people tend to gripe more than they praise in general (squeaky wheel and all that). I'll run the test for significant differences between the two lines some evening when I'm not sipping 18-year old single malt.

More interesting than the numbers was the strange classification system. Plone is considered a software framework. Sharepoint is found under software applications. Drupal is tucked away under Internet content management systems as is Joomla.

If you're feeling good about Plone right now, tweet about it with the trigger phrase "Plone rocks" and hop on over to Amplicate to add your vote to the tally of supporters.

CMS Security

2010-04-27T20:29:00.000-07:00

I'm still trying to catch up on blog posts after March with jury duty and emptying out the parent's home of 40 years. For World Plone Day 2010 I thought I'd bring up one of my favorite contentious subjects: security. Seems like every year some pundit runs through the security arguments for CMS. Here's my chance to get ahead of the curve.

First, the methodology. Candidate CMS's are the top ten listed in CMS Matrix when sorted by compares (BTW, Plone comes in sixth). The source for my security data is the National CVE and CCE Vulnerability Database, searching each candidate CMS for vulnerabilities listed in the past 3 years and past 3 months. The highest level of vulnerability in the past 3 months were counted and totaled as a "Seriousness" score. Here they are in alphabetical order.

CMS	3 yr. vuln.	3 mo. vuln.	Seriousness
DotNetNuke	13	0	0
Drupal	266	16	6 medium
Joomla	426	87	36 high
Mambo	85	0	0
PHP Nuke	6	0	0
Plone	8	0	0
TYPO3	224	44	26 high
WebGUI	9	0	0
WordPress	141	6	4 high
Xoops	65	3	1 high

Second, the results. I'm pleasantly surprised that 5 out of 10 turned up with no vulnerabilities in the past 3 months. However, of those only PHP Nuke has a better 3-year number of vulnerabilities. TYPO3 and Joomla have a much larger number of vulnerabilities rated "high" by the National Vulnerability Database than all the rest combined.

Typically one hears defenses like "CMS x has more vulnerabilities reported because it is more popular/has a larger install base and therefore has more eyes looking for problems." That's the same argument Microsoft put forward for all its security flaws when compared with Linux. You don't want to go there.

But even putting aside the logical fallacies in such arguments, both pro and con, it's clear that systems with more security flaws require more effort to patch and lock down. The bottom line is that more flaws mean more chances for the sys admin to slip up and more opportunities for the bad guys.

By way of an anecdote, at my day-job our computer security people were much relieved to learn that we were using a non-PHP-based CMS. On that note, Happy World Plone Day 2010.

Plone and the Wonder Wheel

2010-04-27T01:35:00.000-07:00

If you google for a term, let's say, "CMS," you'll notice a little "Show options" link at the upper left that you probably use for narrowing down date ranges or filtering news items and images. About 3/4ths of the way down the list of option is one called "Wonder wheel." It displays a spoked wheel labeled with, for lack of a better term, interesting links. The usual top 10 search results appear in a column to the right.

From the CMS wheel, clicking on one of the spoke's links, for example, "Content Management Systems," opens a second wheel, to wit:

What I find interesting is the difference between the top 10 search results and the spokes, looking at which CMS's turn up within each "spin" of the wonder wheel. At the first level ("CMS"), most results are disambiguation links. The only specific systems listed are CMS Made Simple and concrete5, even though "microsoft cms" is one of the spokes.

At the second level, the spokes show ".net content management system," "php nuke," and "microsoft content management system." The top 10 results now return a few general links plus Alfresco, Pligg, LightCMS, ModX, Drupal, Joomla!, and Plone. Oh yes, there are some sponsored links at this point. From here on out, there are always three commercial systems turning up as sponsored links.

Beyond this, the combinations and alternative paths become numerous. Following "enterprise content management system" takes us to a wheel with mostly general spokes, but two specific systems garner a spoke each. Six of the top 10 results are specific systems, none Plone.

Backing up and following "open source content management system," WordPress, CMS Made Simple, and Drupal each label a spoke. Six of the top 10 results are specific systems, one of which is Plone.

Backing up once again and following "web content management system" gets us a wheel with only general categories for spokes but 5 out of the top 10 results are specific systems, none Plone. However, selecting the awkward "web content management system open source" spoke takes you to the first wheel in this chain where Plone has a spoke of its own.

All this raises some questions:

What determines whether an item appears on a particular wonder wheel?
What determines an item's position on the wonder wheel?
Why doesn't Plone have a position somewhere in the daughter wheels of "open source content management?"
What needs to be done to get Plone to turn up in more wheels?

I guess it's that last question that I want to toss out to the Plone community as we count down the final hours to World Plone Day 2010. I can't say that wonder wheels are becoming the new way to search--for one thing, they're not available on Google's mobile page for my Droid. But I can't help thinking that under the hood a better wonder wheel position translates to better SEO behavior in general. Your thoughts, please.

Plone at my Day Job

2010-04-21T17:26:00.000-07:00

Way back in November of 2007, I published a graph of the growth of our Plone projects at my day job. Michael Bernstein asked me to update that graph a couple months ago. Here it is almost May and I'm finally getting around to it.

The blue points show the total number of sites constructed over time based on the date of creation. The yellow points represent the net number of active sites (totals sites minus ones no longer in use). You can see that about 60% of our sites are active at any one time but that we've had very steady growth in the past 5-6 years.

Even though things are flattening out a bit, we find our current projects are much larger and have more sophisticated requirements. Also, we've been migrating old 2.5 sites up to 3.x this past 6 months and that's kept us busy. On top of that, we're finally getting some internal customers to think more broadly about site reuse.

For example, the site for our UNSCR 1540 training grows with each new workshop in the program. A couple years ago each workshop would have had a separate, short-lived website. Now one large portal serves to connect students who participate in different workshops and has a life beyond a single conference. New students have access to previous workshop material and, like any good Web 2.0 phenomenon, the 1540 portal gains value exponentially as the user base grows.

Google Analytics (below) shows that the 1540 portal has garnered a widespread audience. Unfortunately, things haven't picked up in Africa, which is disappointing given that the last workshop was in Nairobi back in February. Even so, we've got a sizable piece of the world covered and that's a good thing.

Quarterly Amazon Sales Rank Stats

2010-04-11T16:48:00.000-07:00

It's time for me to pull myself away from the Herculean task of emptying out my parents' house and get back to our regularly scheduled program. It's the beginning of the quarter when I usually take a moment to see how Plone titles are faring over at Amazon.com. Here's the latest sales rank statistics for Plone texts:

From the zigs and zags you can see that Amazon sales ranks, as always, aren't very stable. Julie Meloni's "Plone Content Management Essentials" took a huge leap. (Remember low sales ranks is a good thing.) And in fact, just about all Plone texts improved their sales ranks. Four books have sales ranks below 200,000 and only three had their rank go upwards (Rose, Cooper, Lotze and Theune). Frankly, I'd have to say this trend, if it continues, could indicate a healthy turn of affairs just in time for Plone 4.

Mobile Plone

2010-04-01T03:09:00.000-07:00

A colleague sent me an article on mobile computing this afternoon and among other things, it inspired me to take a look at what's shaking with Plone and mobile devices. Google Analytics for the past five months has been tracking mobile device stats. You can find it under Visitors | Mobile | Mobile Devices.

Using Plone.org as an exemplar, Analytics tells us that less than 1% of visitors are using a mobile device. Conveniently, Analytics breaks this down by operating system. Looks like iPhone is the clear winner at the moment, even with the small sample size.

iPhone	65%
Android	10%
iPod	10%
SymbianOS	8%
BlackBerry	2%
Other	5%

One can also group by browser and here Safari comes in with a resounding 80% followed by a weak 13% for Mozilla Compatible Agents. NetFront has 1% while Opera, IE, BlackBerry and the rest trickle in at less than 0.8% each.

The mobile usage statistics are quite different from our average Plone.org visitor. Pages per mobile visit average 2.5 while the site average is 4.4. Average mobile time on site is 2 minutes vs 4.5 for the overall average. Mobile users are not going deeply into the site and leaving quickly. Looks like some refactoring for mobile would be helpful to this small but growing population of site users.

There is a barely perceptible upward trend in mobile visitors over the five months for which we have data. The daily stats are very noisy with lots of variability from day to day. I'll continue to track this over time and see where it leads.

Meanwhile, be thinking about your own sites and how users with mobile devices are experiencing them. Give some thought to Jakob Nielen's remarks on mobile usability. Mobile devices are set to become the dominant means by which a huge chunk of the world's population are getting to the Web. Don't leave them out.

Weekend Visitors

2010-03-02T03:19:00.000-08:00

Now that the dust and feathers from the Great Backyard Plone Count have settled, it's time to get back to basics. Tonight I was looking in on visitor stats for Plone.net and Plone.org. An interesting pattern turned up that I'd missed before. Here are two graphs from Plone.org of roughly the last six months, the first of visitors:

and the second of % new visitors:

The most obvious feature is the Holiday Dip during the week of Christmas, although new visits didn't collapse over the vacation. However, if one looks closely (very closely, trust me on this) the "teeth" of new visitors line up precisely with the weekly minima of all visitors. Every "% new visitor" maxima is on a Saturday or Sunday. Every "all visitor" maxima is on a Monday through Wednesday with a deep drop-off on the weekends.

New visitors are peaking on the weekends while visitors in general are hitting the site early in the work week.

It's 4:00 in the morning and I'm still trying to work out the implications. Clearly Plone is an enterprise CMS, not one that caters to hobbyists. Early each week Plone users, managers, and developers hit Plone.org with news, events, questions, and answers as they do their work and solve their problems du jour.

But every Saturday, a group of new visitors arrive on-site. It's only about 10% higher than the usual flow of new visitors. Are these professional web designers and developers frustrated with their company's CMS (or lack thereof) and looking for something better? Are they DIY'ers looking to see if they can make use of Plone for some weekend project? Are they volunteers, now that the work week is done, helping out their favorite philanthropic endeavor?

It may be a case of "all of the above." I'd appreciate hearing your theories on this and certainly like to get feedback from any newcomers who first hit Plone.org on a Saturday.

Great Backyard Plone Count Results

2010-02-21T20:33:00.000-08:00

First off, I want to thank all of you who participated in this year's GBPC. We garnered 219 sites, which is up 19% from 2009. We had contributions from Canada, Germany, Italy, U.K., and U.S. Considering that Delicious has 2016 sites tagged with "plone-site" and Plone.net lists 1955, we've collected a sample of over 10% of the easily known Plone sites.

Industries that were listed included education (53), non-profit (24), government (14), healthcare(11), small business (8), assoications (6), arts & entertainment (5), and environmental (5) plus 45 others. Thirty were private intranets, so in that regard the GBPC was useful in getting a sample of sites that are normally out of sight.

Of interest to me and Jukka Ojaniemi was the usability column this year. 52% of the sites reported had a self-reported rating of 3 ("Awesome"), 27% had a rating of 2 ("Alright"), and only 3% sucked. About 19% lacked a usability score since they were confirmed from last year without further updating. A little spot checking of sites with different scores show a fair amount of unevenness in the ratings--some clean, even elegant sites scored low while similar ones did very well. Overall however, I'd say that Plone lends itself to uncluttered, easy to navigate sites.

I'll be digging around in the data in the weeks ahead but for now the raw data is at the Google Docs spreadsheet. From Twitter today Nate Aune suggested using Celery and Scrape.py to crawl and scrape for a web-wide search for Plone sites. Expect a more complete Plone census as I work on that.

The Great Backyard Plone Count

2010-02-11T02:00:00.000-08:00

As promised, the Second Annual Great Backyard Plone Count has begun. The GBPCis a shameless copy of the Great Backyard Bird Count (which will soon be active for those in North America). Just as GBBC is an effort by the Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to track birds, GBPC is an effort to catalog Plone sites worldwide. Its a voluntary, self-reporting project (with all the weaknesses that go along with it) that attempts to find as many Plone sites as possible, including and especially intranet sites behind firewalls.

The Great Backyard Plone Count is an annual four-day event that engages Plone watchers of all ages in counting Plone sites to create a real-time snapshot of where the sites are across the world. This year the GBPC is February 12-15, 2009, the same dates as the GBBC (with adjustments to give our worldwide Plonistas a full 4 days in any timezone). Anyone can participate, from beginning Plonistas to experts. It takes as little as a few minutes on one day, or you can count for as long as you like each day of the event. It’s free, fun, and easy—and it helps Plone. We'll be adding updated 2010 GBPC materials on this blog and on the Plone marketing site as they become available.

The tools that are now active include Google Docs or Gmail mechanisms to:

Use the 2010 Data Form

Download the Plone Checklist (download an empty table--use File | Download as--fill in all your sites at once; CSV or OpenOffice Calc preferred)

Submit Your Plone Checklist (upload a bulk list to the GBPC e-mail address)

Confirm last year's sites (send the msg "Confirm All" or list inactive sites, one URL per line--you may still add new site sightings by either method above)

Explore the 2009 Results

Thanks in advance for your participation.

GBPC on Prezi

How to ID Plone Sites

2010-02-08T03:00:00.000-08:00

The Great Backyard Plone Count kicks off at the cusp of midnight this Friday 12 February, just like its ornithological counterpart, the Great Backyard Bird Count. The bird watchers have it easy, only dealing with North America and the fact that few birds can be seen by the dark of night. But Plone sites "fly" 24x7 and Plone watchers are scattered worldwide. (Darryl Dixon of New Zealand wins the prize for being the first from that timezone to submit a "siting" last year from the easternmost timezone that participated.)

The result is that as Thursday turns to Friday in say Kiritimati, the earliest timezone, it will be midnight Wed-Thurs in Honolulu, 3:00 AM Thursday in Albuquerque, and 10:00 AM Thursday in London. (Tip o' the hat to The Fixed Time World Clock.) So we'll open up the online submission form at 3:00 AM MST Thursday 11 February and close it down at 3:00 AM MST Tuesday 15 February. That way every timezone gets the full window of opportunity, even if it adds 24 hours to the worldwide event. Plone.org shows visitors from Fiji and New Zealand (Suva and Auckland are +13 UTC), as well as New Caledonia (Noumea is +11 UTC), so we want to give everyone an opportunity to participate fully.

Last week I posted a GBPC Prezi presentation but noted that it was stripped out of Planet Plone and other feeds. If you care, take a look at http://prezi.com/jahnf2owdk9y/. Also, while on the subject of Prezi, I created a reusable Prezi for Plone in general, embedded at the end of this post. Maurizio Delmonte has already translated it into Italian and it looks like Naotaka Hotta is working on a Japanese version.

Meanwhile, Nate Aune and I have been having a discussion about how one can identify Plone sites. Of course, the obvious ways are to look for that nice "Plone Powered" colophon and the generator tag (<meta name = "Plone - http://plone.org" >). Another effective way to ID Plone sites is to tag them in Delicious (thanks again, Sam). Just make sure that your Plone sites are tagged with the phrase "plone-site" and they'll turn up when we search http://delicious.com/search?p=plone-site. Right now there are 1932 sites tagged in this manner. If you haven't tagged your site(s), do so now and next weekend's data mining will sweep them up.

In untagged sites that are highly customized or have a static front end, we may have to rely on other features for identification. Lukasz developed Plone data-mining scripts (http://www.llakomy.com/articles/plone-websites-in-uk) for the UK. Builtwith is using a proprietary algorithm and some sort of sampling to track trends in web technologies (they also seem to be missing some obvious high-profile Plone sites, so I'm not too confident in their statistics). Last year when I discussed this, there was a comment from Andreas Jung via Matt Hamilton that is germane. They suggest that "/manage_copyright" is a useful method exposed by Zope 2 sites. I'd love to see what other techniques people can come up with.

Especially for firewalled Plone sites deep behind proxy servers, the only way we'll ever be able to count your contribution is for you as a site developer, user, or owner to self-report. Whatever way you identify Plone sites, take a moment next weekend to tag them in Delicious (if they're public) and submit new or confirm your previous year's sitings (active links to the tools will be Tweeted and published in this blog starting the 12th). Get out there and count some birds, too.

Plone on Prezi

The Great Backyard Plone Count 2010

2010-01-30T04:36:00.000-08:00

I'm gearing up for this year's GBPC, The Great Backyard Plone Count in only 14 more days. This year's event corresponds with The Great Backyard Bird Count, also taking place on the same long weekend, 12-15 February, 2010.

Last year, our first ever, we took in 184 sightings of Plone sites. Thanks to every one who participated especially to Matt Hamilton (30 sites) and D. Thomas (27 sites), who were our top contributors. If you contributed last year, we'll set up a simple mechanism for you to simply confirm that they are still active sites without having to re-enter any data.

One important change this year is the addition of a usability question, inspired by Jukka Ojaniemi's Plone research. It's just a quick 1-3 scale (awful to alright to awesome), but it will help define the span of Plone quality.

Some of the tools we'll set up will include Google Docs mechanisms to:

Use the 2010 Data Form (active only 12-15 Feb.)

Download the Plone Checklist (download an empty table, fill in all your sites at once)

Submit Your Plone Checklist (upload a bulk list to an e-mail address--active only 12-15 Feb.)

Confirm last year's sites (via e-mail notification--active only 12-15 Feb--you may still add new site sightings)

Explore the 2009 Results

Considering that Plone.net lists 1950 sites, being able to track about 10% of that number, especially intranets that are otherwise invisible behind firewalls is very helpful to those of us who watch the numbers.

Plone and Disaster Relief

2010-01-22T20:17:00.000-08:00

Watching the Hope for Haiti Now telethon, I'm reminded that one reason my shop uses Plone harkens back to the Sumatran earthquake and tsunami back in Dec. 2004. We were babes in arms, futzing around with various home-built Python and Zope concoctions for interactive websites. Plone 2.0.1 had come up on my radar as a promising alternative to home cooking our portals.

Meanwhile, Oxfam America had just retooled their website using Plone with the help of Enfold Systems. December 26 the disaster in Sumatra struck. In a single month the new Oxfam America site processed something on the order of $14 million in charitable donations, an amazing amount. Obviously Plone could handle the scalability problem. (See how they did it.) Oxfam America continues its next-generation site with the help of Jazcarta.

With that vote of confidence, we forged ahead, building numerous small to medium portals, upgrading to 2.5, and basically getting steadily smarter about the whole Python-Zope-Plone stack. Just yesterday we retired our first portal, Sandia's Training Course on Cooperative Monitoring, due to budget reductions. However, our second, a water monitoring and hydrogeological modeling site, continues to this day.

Now, with the Haitian earthquake crisis, I'm reminded that catastrophes continue to plague the world and Plone continues to play a role. Go to Oxfam America and give whatever you are able to. If you can, give a monthly gift to help sustain their continuing efforts worldwide.

CMS PageRanks

2010-01-10T01:28:00.000-08:00

Alexander Limi pointed out in a tweet back in late December that Plone.org was one of only 148 websites with a Google pagerank of 9 or higher. Interestingly, only WordPress and Mambo of other CMS make it onto the list.

That said, some pseudo-pagerank estimators include Joomla and Drupal in the pagerank 9 levels. At the same time, sites such as Alfresco.com and Interwoven.com have only a PR of 7, while Vignette.com (OpenText) has an 8. Fatwire.com drags in with a 6.

Oracle and some other big names turn up, but probably due to their mainline software, not necessarily their CMS. Microsoft.com has a PR of 9 but their SharePoint site only pulls in a 7. Oracle's WebCenter Suite scores a 6.

Like Amazon sales ranks, the data is dynamic along several axes: when and which Google data center is being queried. iWebTools shows 33 different data centers where for Drupal.org most list a PR of 0 at the moment even while Plone.org rocks on with a 9. This may be a measure of a CMS's search engine optimization more than anything else, in which case Plone is one of the leaders.
_______________

In closing I'd like to mention that one of my favorite Plone sites, the Great Backyard Bird Count, shows this year's event scheduled for February 12-15, 2010. Get your binoculars out!

And that means that the Great Backyard Plone Count is on for that same 96-hour period. Stand by for details, including instructions on CMS spotting. Tip o' the hat to Seth Gottlieb at content here for publicizing last year's event.

A New Look--A New Year

2010-01-06T02:26:00.000-08:00

After fussing around with my blogger template for altogether too long, I've moved on to a new template. Hopefully, this one is pleasing to the eye and easy to read.

I've taken this opportunity to start off the new year with my quarterly Amazon sales rank statistics. As is often the case, the values are bouncing around quite a bit. New titles like Rose's Plone 3 for Education and Williams' Plone 3 Theming are doing well. Aspeli's Professional Plone Development is still holding its own. Plone Live (Pelletier & Shariff) is at the top of the graph, but that's an artifact of their online sales that bypass Amazon. In fact, many Plone titles are published and sold by Packt directly, which probably dilutes their sales ranks.

Plone Metrics Person of the Year Award

2009-12-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again, time to single out someone who I personally believe did an outstanding job of participating in the Plone community, contributed significantly to the promotion of Plone, and is a heckuva human being. This year has been singularly tough for me, in large part due to my inability to attend the Budapest convention. It's at World Plone that I often get my inspiration for an award that manifestly is unilaterally decided and, for a blog that prides itself on getting the numbers right, totally based on my own qualitative perceptions and myoptic view of the Plone world.

All that said, there are a ton of worthy folks out there. Here are just a few of the contenders that have crossed my mind in a hectic week of holiday cheer, out-of-town visitors, and post-cold virus sniffles.

David Glick, Rob Porter, and Mikko Ohtamaa were the top 3 in the Plone IRC Superstar Contest. Hats off to them and all the others on IRC who make it happen day in and day out. Along with the core developers, book authors, and the documentation team, you are the engine that keeps Plone moving forward.
And speaking of Plone development, the release managers for 3.x (Wichert Akkerman) and 4 (Eric Steele) have my undying admiration.
Another worthy group is the Foundation Board (another tip o' the hat to all Board members, past and present). Jon Stahl (2008-9 Prez) and Gier Baekholt (this year's Esteemed Leader) should be particularly touted.
A fourth group that I looked at were the evangelists, the Plone marketing folks. Mark Corum holds the marketing chair on the Board, but he is surrounded by others who spread the word: Nate Aune, Matt Hamilton, Dylan Jay, and Roberto Allende all are high-volume participants on the Evangelism forum over on Nabble. Roberto as one of the key champions of World Plone Day deserves special mention and Matt did an especially excellent job as Program Chair for this year's conference..

There was a strong urge to follow Time Magazine 2006 down the path of "You" as the person of the year. And it's very true that the community as a whole and the entire Plone ecosystem has much to be proud of. That said, I'll stick with my tradition, such as it is, and choose an individual. (Drum roll, please.)

Today Nate Aune is named as Plone Metric's Person of the Year. His participation at events of all sizes and kinds, plus his consistent and notable contributions to the Evangelism Forum have had a strong positive effect on the Plone community and our perception in the CMS world. As before, this award comes with no monetary compensation and only the promise of a free beer whenever Nate and I are in the same town.

Happy New Year!

Plone Metrics 2009 Recap

2009-12-27T03:37:00.000-08:00

Last year was an eventful one for Plone. Thankfully, it was less so for me, with my parents doing well after a disastrous Dec. 2008. However, last week's cold set me back in terms of my December postings. With my sniffles pretty much gone, its now time to get back to wrapping up the year at Plone Metrics.

2009 had 50 postings--I almost kept up with my weekly schedule. Readership was much higher overall and spiked several times. There were 58 comments, thank you very much. Unfortunately, the site was the victim of a spate of non-sensical comments that merely attempted to insert links to other CMS products. As a result I've had to enable comment moderation on the blog. My apologies for having to slow down the pace of interaction.

Well, let's sift through the monthly summaries and see what's gone under the bridge in 2009.

January. Discussions about CMS Matrix data, CMS blog postings, and usability for seniors were featured last January and received some excellent comments.

February. The Great Backyard Plone Count was in February and we gleaned some interesting data. I'll continue this the month after next for our third year of data collection. Meanwhile, a piece on usability of CMS home sites was widely read.

March. Themes turned to the quarterly review of Amazon sales rank stats, a look at the CMS Watch annual subway map, and the roll-out of the new Plone.org.

April. With spring came the 2nd Annual World Plone Day and the Idealware CMS Report. There followed a heated discussion over at Four Kitchens about Drupal vs Plone security vulnerabilities. This was an area where Idealware ranked Plone as outstanding but Drupal only as solid.

May. The "Blank Spots" series wrapped up in May after looking at Plone.org visitor demographics, temporal rhythms, and visitor loyalty.

June. We got our first look at LaunchPad download stats. BTW, as of today the Plone 3.3 series has had over 110,000 downloads while 3.2 has had over 1,000,000.

July. Plone Twitter stats, Amazon sales ranks, and a look back at Paul Graham's 2001 software popularity essay.

August. A posting following up on the New York Times article on SharePoint and a discussion about "black swan" events rounded out the month.

September. A posting entitled "The Plone-SharePoint Chronicles" garnered wide readership and continues to collect search hits to this day.

October. This month turned up an anomaly that reminds us statisticians that we really have to understand the underlying data. A simple post mentioning the Packt CMS Awards that pointed out their nominations per category led to an enormous spike in readership. Almost certainly this was due to some cross-posting about the Packt Awards, not the eloquence of my deep vision about open source community awards. Of course, the month ended with the World Plone Conference in Budapest, which I was unable to attend .

November. More proselytizing about Plone when it took the Packt Award for Other Open Source. An essay about decision-making, paradoxes of choice, information cascades, and snap decisions also rounded out the month.

December. The CMS Watch Subway Map was released and I had some fun reworking the routes to produce a more Plone-centric view. Version 4 Alpha 3 has just released. Now all that remains is to figure out who will be Plone Metrics Person of the Year. The tension is palpable...

A Plone-Centric View of CMS Technology

2009-12-12T13:16:00.000-08:00

Some clever person over in the Plone Evangelism Forum (Armin Stross-Radschinski) suggested that the community look at a Plone-centric subway map. From that germ of an idea comes this modification of the CMS Watch Subway Map:

This leaves a nasty jog in the Blue line where Alfresco to Typo3 now connects with the Plone station. If I had the time and patience, I'd flip the Blue line over to the other side of the Red line and continue it in the same direction as the Alfresco-Plone leg, although that would crowd into the CMS Watch logo in the center.

I'll leave it to CMS Watch to see if they agree with the repositioning shown above. It echos the remarks made by Limi in this year's Future of Plone address at World Plone 2009 -- we're not competing with the Drupals and Joomlas of the world.

To move Plone onto the main line, we'd have to add one or both of Enterprise Content Management or Digital Asset Management. If you think about it, were Plone classified as a strong Digital Asset Management system, it would probably also meet the criteria for ECM. It all goes back to the discussion about what constitutes an ECM. I'm not sure that Wikipedia has the last word on that, at least at the moment. The article there is listed as having multiple issues.

Meanwhile, after some reflection, it occurred to me to extract the Red-Blue-Green lines and look at the neighborhood around Plone in a less cluttered view. That led me to a Venn diagram instead of a subway map:

This omits all the other CMS Watch categories and leaves a very clear Plone-centric picture. Plone is running with the big dogs and its the only open source solution in the center.
_______________

In closing, we're fast coming up on the New Year and that can only mean one thing: Plone Metrics' Person of the Year Award. No cash, no prizes, but as they say on Iron Chef, they'll have "the peoples' ovation and fame forever." Now accepting suggestions until Dec. 28.

Happy Plone Holidays!

Plone's Place in the Content Tech Subway

2009-12-10T05:05:00.000-08:00

There's been a healthy discussion in the forums about why Plone doesn't qualify on the CMS Watch subway map as a Enterprise Content Management System (ECM). While looking at where Plone falls in the lower left quadrant, it occurs to me that there's another comparison out there that puts a different perspective on things.

Consider that Plone is classified under Web Content Management (Blue Line), Enterprise Portal (Green Line), and Social Software & Collaboration (Red Line). What other systems share this rare combination of features?

Turns out its very, very few and they are heavy hitters on the commercial side: IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle/Sun.

Taking Plone's strengths and looking at them pair-wise, we have Red-Blue, Blue-Green, and Red-Green. Where are these combinations found?

Red-Blue is found (exclusive of the triple combo systems above) only in Drupal and FatWire. Oddly, Drupal is found in the absolute lower-left corner while FatWire is in the lower right. One would think these two would be placed near one another.

Blue-Green is a very unique combination, only found otherwise in Open Text/Vignette. It differs from IBM and Microsoft only in lacking the Social Software & Collaboration (Red) line.

Finally, Red-Green is extremely interesting in that only Plone and the big three commercial vendors hold that combination. Red-Green is as diagnostic as Red-Green-Blue in classifying this group of four technologies. Of course, only Plone is open source, so it is very distinctive.

If your organization needs an enterprise-level portal for web content publishing that features strong collaboration tools, Plone is your system. When you take into account its secure, open source architecture and total cost of ownership, Plone is a winner. In fact, those last two sentences exactly articulate why I use Plone for our cooperative international programs in my day-job.

CMS Watch Subway Map

2009-12-05T18:20:00.000-08:00

The 2010 Content Technology Subway Map just came out (thanks, CMS Watch). The format is superficially changed, but by and large its the same concept just cast perhaps in the style of a different city's public transport map. (Anyone know the basis for this year's map? Toyko? Vienna? DC? London? Please comment.)

There's been a surprising amount of discussion over on the Evangelism Forum about Plone's position. The short answer is that since the 2009 map came out Plone and its neighbors haven't moved an iota. Then there's the long answer... (do I ever have a short answer?).

The significant changes comparing 2010 to 2009 are the addition of a line between Yahoo! and Adobe (the Lime Line--Web Analytics) as well as a link between Reccomend to Adobe (Orange Line--Search & Information Access). There has been an extension to the Brown line with Fabasoft, Docuware, and Objective. Vignette has been added to Open Text on the main line. Vyre has been added on the Purple and Blue lines (between Open Text and Day). Cisco has been removed from the Red line and Jboss is now JBoss/Exo (moved to a new spot on the Green line between MS and Oracle).

Of more interest to Plone are changes in the lower left quadrant. Exo has been added on the Green Line (Enterprise Portal) and OpenCMS has been added on the Blue Line (Web Content Management). Plone is still a triple threat CMS--Enterprise Portal, Web Content Management, and Social Software & Collaboration systems.

Open Source as Pawns?

2009-11-30T20:20:00.000-08:00

Ashlee Vance in today's NY Times writes about the hypothesis of OSS being manipulated by dominant technology companies.

In some cases, dominant technology companies have used open-source projects as pawns. Google, for example, has needled Microsoft by providing financial support to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which oversees of the development of Firefox. I.B.M. has been a major backer of Linux, helping to raise it as a competitor to Microsoft’s Windows and other proprietary operating systems.

Many of the top open-source developers are anything but volunteers tinkering in their spare time. Companies like I.B.M., Google, Oracle and Intel pay these developers top salaries to work on open-source projects and further the companies’ strategic objectives.

The MySQL-Sun-Oracle story is worrisome in this regard. With SharePoint 2010 getting rolled out to great fanfare, one has to wonder if Michael Olson's statement has merit:

“A lot of open-source firms are one-product companies, and it’s hard to build a long-term, successful business that way.”

That said, there's a lot of activity in the CMS market these days for "one-trick ponies." Drupal (1.48%), vBulletin (0.83%), ExpressionEngine (0.38%), and Ektron (0.33%) make up 80% of the 3.79% of all websites surveyed by BuiltWith that have an identifiable CMS.

And 3.79% of all websites is a huge number--CMS's are definitely here to stay, although I'm stunned that people are still individually handcrafting webpages these days. (Writing HTML now makes me feel like a monk manually illuminating a single page of a book.)

Plone manages to stay in the top 10, although the BuiltWith data doesn't yet reflect any boost from the recent Packt Awards (there is a slight bump up in the Nov. 15 data). Likewise Plone is number 6 on CMS Matrix when the lists are sorted by either number of views or compares.

Running Drupal, ExpressionEngine and Ektron (sorry, no vBulletin info available) through CMS Matrix against Plone, reveals some interesting bits. Drupal is missing (or limited) in 30 listed features when compared side-by-side with Plone. Ektron lacks 22 features present (or positively scored) in Plone. ExpressionEngine is short 66 features that are present in Plone. Converted to percentages based on 139 features, we have the following shortfalls relative to Plone:

Drupal -22%
Ektron -17%
ExpressionEngine -47%

Those are pretty wide functional gaps and it doesn't begin to factor in benefits like stronger security, immensely flexible workflow, and UML modeling of content types.

Decisions, Decisions...

2009-11-20T03:52:00.000-08:00

Looking at CMS Matrix tonight I find an astonishing 1099 listings. How can anyone make a sane decision with that many choices? This ties in nicely with Barry Schwartz's thoughts in a TED video on the paradox of choice: too many choices lead to decision-making paralysis and dissatisfaction. He provides examples with salad dressings, jeans, and cell phones, among several others. To over-simplify his thesis, too many potential choices increase the difficulty of decision-making and heighten expectations. This in turn dilutes satisfaction with one's ultimate decision.

In his book "The Paradox of Choice" he points out that even infinite choice isn't a bad thing if it can be conceptualized in a simple way, for example, in a one-dimensional matrix comparing a simple feature set. But as the dimensions of comparison go up, the computation needed to calculate an optimal choice becomes increasingly difficult. I see this at my day-job where they have been unable to decide on a corporate standard for CMS. In the end, people look for surrogates for quality to simplify the decision-making process, things like the recent Packt Awards or the Idealware report.

Another solution is to follow the herd and make the same decision others before you have made. This can easily lead to an information cascade and sub-optimal results. I've discussed these beasts elsewhere, but want to point out again that herd behavior is fragile--a little correct contrary knowledge can quickly dispel an information cascade.

Of course, one problem is that one size (CMS) does not fit all. In my case workflow and security trump everything else, so the choice is dramatically limited... and simplified. I don't spend my time agonizing about if I made the right choice or second-guessing myself.

Along those lines, in a bookstore tonight I saw a copy of "Blink," also about decision-making. After only a short skim, I'd say that I agree with the author: we often make an optimal decision within seconds but then our slower conscious analytical processes talk ourselves out of it. (This is not to say that reflective decision-making is always a bad idea, just that we should weigh our initial impressions more heavily in the reflective process.)

I see this all the time grading tests at college--the initial correct answer is erased and an incorrect answer finally selected. I tell my students all the time to not second-guess themselves unless they have a good reason.

This resonates with a number of usability studies that indicate that we make web choices within seconds or fractions of seconds. This article by Jakob Neilson has a good discussion and references on this topic. BTW, almost 60% of visits to Plone.org are less than 10 seconds. On the other hand, about 30% of the visitors stay 3-30 minutes. My guess is that Plone.org visitors aren't generally making a "use Plone" decision in 10 seconds.

Now here's an experiment for you: go to Plone.org and count off 10 seconds while you look at the site. What did you remember? Branch with bud, Plone South America, "powerful, flexible, easy to install, use, and extend."

Do the same for Drupal.org: two simultaneous releases, "critical security vulnerabilities," Whitehouse.gov.

Try OpenOffice.org: productivity suite, learn, download, help, do more, participate. Hmm? Simplifying choice, but letting the user make an informed decision about what to do next. Maybe Schwartz is on to something...

Packt Feedback

2009-11-11T02:54:00.000-08:00

Stoyan Stefanov, one of Packt's judges, gives a high-level overview of how he saw the non-PHP systems stack up during this year's competition. His evaluation included these bullets:

python
slick and contemporary
impressive list of add-ons
excellent step-by-step tutorials, manuals and a free online book
impressive client list, starting with (since I bitch about performance throughout this post) Akamai, the CDN provider
+1 for performance best practices
-10 for missing demo?

Obviously the missing demo didn't count too heavily against Plone, but it might be something that both the evangelism and hosting groups could look into.

Packt Best Other Open Source CMS Award

2009-11-09T07:20:00.001-08:00

And the winner is... Plone!

For the second year running Plone makes it to the winner's circle and walks away with $2000. Second place went to dotCMS and third place to mojoPortal.

I still think the category should be Best Python Open Source CMS. Best Other OS CMS would then include PHP and dotNET frameworks. ;-)

Remember that this is much of a black box award, with community voting contributing to the nomination process and then final votes factoring in with Packt's judging panel in some mysterious way. None-the-less, I don't recommend that the Plone Foundation turn down the prize money.

Also remember that Packt is in the business of selling books and their judging panel would be foolish if they didn't take books sales into account. Right now their are four main Plone titles from Packt and a fifth expected any day now.

By comparison (hey, I've got to have some metrics in this post) Drupal and Joomla have 16 titles each, while WordPress only has 8.

Meanwhile Plonistas, kick back and have a well deserved cup o' joe (for those of us in the Western Hemisphere). The rest of you in Europe and Africa can go straight for other celebratory beverages. For Australia, New Zealand and the Far East, get out of bed and set off some fireworks!

Whitehouse.gov Goes Open Source

2009-10-28T01:29:00.000-07:00

It was a red-letter day for open-source software when the White House announced its transition from ASP.NET to Drupal on Oct. 24. Several insightful pieces have already been written in the blogosphere (Nancy Scola and Tim O'Reilly), so I'll not rehash that here. Instead I'll do the usual and take a look at some numbers.

Some obvious choices for searching stats turn out to create problems. Uncle Sam's Google Search returns things like the National Vulnerabilities Database listing for a given CMS. Perhaps given that its 3:30 a.m., a first whack at how many .gov sites are out there using OS is to simply look at self-reporting for some representative CMS's.

CMS	Sites Reported	Source URL
DotNetNuke	--	(No obvious collection available. If anyone knows of one, please comment.)
Drupal	46	http://groups.drupal.org/node/19885 and http://groups.drupal.org/node/24119
Joomla	30	http://community.joomla.org/showcase/sites/government-and-nonprofit/government.html
Plone	234	http://plone.net/sites/sites_listing?industries%3Alist=Government
WordPress	17	http://wordpress.org/showcase/tag/government/

Although its been heralded as a watershed moment for open source, FOSS has been steadily penetrating the .gov domain for years. The high-profile nature of whitehouse.gov, however, gives open source a great boost. But places like Albuquerque, Newport News, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, and many others have been using open source for years. I recommend reading the e-Government article in Wikipedia with an eye towards FOSS mentions, which are numerous.

As always, the message is to match requirements with capabilities. If you're a PHP shop with lots of talent in that area, you might be inclined to go in that direction. Similarly, with ASP.NET staff, DNN is a player. If security is one of your top concerns, Plone should be on your short list.

Meanwhile, here's another plug for FosterMilo's presentation at World Plone 2009 on Day 2 -- "Helping the Government Go Plone." They were instrumental in getting Plone up and running for the Cities of Albuquerque and Raton here in New Mexico. If past presentations are any indication (here's one of my favs), this will be a good one.

While in Budapest

2009-10-25T04:15:00.000-07:00

For all you lucky Plonistas that made it to Budapest, here's my suggestions on a few things to do. While there're plenty of shops, restaurants, museums, and other diversions in the city proper, I found the west side of the river to have some of the best scenary. Here's the Buda Castle...

with its impressive cathedral.

There's also a number of interesting subterranean features in Budapest, especially if the day is wet. Try the Castle Labyrinth up on Buda Hill (not for the claustrophobic) and then relax in the underground bar at the Hilton.

After a long day of sight-seeing, conferencing, sprinting, or to get the kinks out of your back after a long flight, try one of Budapest's many spas. When I was there (Dec. 2000), I stayed at the Hotel Gellert with its enormous and beautiful swimming pool, massage options, and hot springs.

Just don't believe their in-house TV ads talking about "radioactive" water :-))

Afterwards, just across the street is a path that will take you to the top of Gellerthegy, the Gellert Hill. Excellent vistas of the city, especially at night, await you.

In closing this non-statistical posting, congratulations to Chantal and Alex. Be sure to toast the happy couple when they present "Helping the Government Go Plone" (Day 2, 16:15).

Blog Action Day

2009-10-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

Just a quick posting about Blog Action Day with this year's topic of climate change. Kinda hard to fold climate change into a blog about Plone, CMS, and measuring the effectiveness of web tools.

Best link I can think of between Plone and climate change is that of the relationship between environmental NGO's and Plone. A quick glance at Plone.net shows 46 sites identified with the industry area of "Environmental." This is one market area where Plone has repeatedly shown its strengths in delivering top notch content management solutions to NGO's and not-for-profits in this domain.

So hat's off to all the Plonistas working to deal with climate change on this Blog Action Day.

I'd also like to point readers in the direct of Sigourney Weaver's article in the Huffington Post on oceanic acidification. You might disagree with CO2's effect on global warming, but its effect on aquatic pH is undeniable.

More Stats from Amazon

2009-10-13T02:01:00.000-07:00

Its been another quarter and its time for a look at Amazon sales ranks for Plone books. From the graph above, you can see that some texts are bouncing around while others are trending steadily. I can't really explain the sales improvement for many titles last July (remember "dips" are actually good in terms of sales rank). The new titles have lost ground somewhat after the initial flurry of sales, but no one has gone over a cliff.

Without doing any further analysis (hey, its 3 a.m.), it looks like there's a cluster of books in the low to mid hundreds of thousands and another cluster above 800,000. We'll have to wait until December to see if this pattern is persistent.

My own behavior might explain some of this from an anecdotal point of view. At my day job we've just been going through the upgrade from 2.5 to 3.1 (don't ask). At any rate, its time to dust off my notes from Joel Burton's class last year and buy the Plone 3 texts for the rest of the staff. Not being an early adopter in the Plone upgrade process, we've held off on upgrading our technical library until now. I suspect others are in the same boat and this sort of lag will continue to drive Plone 3 book sales for some time.

I read with interest a piece from Morris Rosenthal where he's basically reverse engineered the sales ranks. Despite that, Amazon numbers are amazingly fluid and trending them is tricky, especially for those with ranks below 20,000. He's got some interesting graphs and an insightful writeup. In simple terms, Morris states the obvious:

Read an average rank of 1,000 to mean you have a seriously successful title, an average rank of 10,000 to mean your doing pretty good for a book that's no bestseller, an average rank of 100,000 to mean it's not going to contribute significantly to your income, and an average rank of 1,000,000 to mean you need to take a break from checking sales ranks.

Of course, these are Amazon numbers, so remember that online sales (Pelletier & Shariff) and direct sales from our friends at Packt (many of the others) will have a significant impact. Its also nice to note that Plone top sellers have ratings of 4.5 to 5.0.

By way of comparison, Drupal has four titles with sales ranks under 20,000. Unfortunately, they all have ratings of 4.5 or less. Joomla has three titles ranked under 50,000. Their ratings are 4.0 or less. WordPress has four books ranked under 20,000 ranked variously between 3.5 and 5.0.

Vote for Your CMS

2009-10-03T01:43:00.000-07:00

This weekend's post will be a quick one... in Albuquerque its the beginning of the annual Balloon Fiesta. In about four hours we'll see many hundreds of balloons take to the air for the first of several mass ascensions.

Of interest this week is that the nominations are in for the Packt Open Source Awards. Plone made the finalist's circle. The short list of five "best other open source CMS" contenders includes:

DotNetNuke
dotCMS
mojoPortal
Plone
WebGUI

By way of comparison, the PHP finalists are:

Drupal
Joomla
MODx
TYPOlight
WordPress

And the overall finalists are:

DotNetNuke
MODx
SilverStripe
WordPress
XOOPS

Its interesting that only DotNetNuke of the Other CMS category and MODx and WordPress of the PHP CMS group made it into the overall finalists. Drupal and Joomla appear have been promoted out of the overall category into the new Hall of Fame.

You can see that Packt is having to deal with a serious apples and oranges problem here, with .net solutions, blogging software, Perl, C#, Python, and J2EE systems in the mix. Although the Packt process is not particularly transparent, it does seem to be one that very roughly approximates how well particular communities can mobilize and get out the vote. To Open Source as a whole, its gratifying to see more than 12,000 votes in the nomination phase.

Voting is now open until October 30 so hop over and vote. Its worth $2000 to the Plone Foundation if it takes first place in its category.

The Plone-SharePoint Chronicles

2009-09-15T21:22:00.000-07:00

Although SharePoint and Plone overlap somewhat in feature sets, any comparison is an apples-and-oranges affair. Basically, SharePoint is a document management system while Plone is a web-publishing, content management system.

Key requirements in my situation of interest include moving draft documents out of staff inboxes for version control, providing an unambiguous story to senior management, and presenting a well thought-out and compelling line of reasoning to external stakeholders (web publishing). At the same time, draft and sensitive documents must be protected.

For any external collaborative website that requires brand identification, Plone is strongly recommended. For an internal, no-frills document collection with static folder structure, SharePoint can deliver an acceptable solution that is familiar to many users.

A hybrid solution (SharePoint internal/Plone external) will require constant manual intervention to maintain synchronization of appropriate documents. External access, for example, from partner universities, to an internal SharePoint site will not be an option. If this use-case is anticipated, a Plone-only architecture may be warranted. Otherwise, it will be necessary for core team members to look in two places (internal and external) for documents based on whether an outside editor is one of the contributors. As the program broadens, the likelihood of additional external authors increases, making this a more likely problem.

Downstream requirements expansions should be considered before settling on a final architecture. Once implemented, the management-level user community will operate with considerable inertia.

SharePoint	Plone
Microsoft SharePoint is a collection of products and software elements that includes collaboration functions, process management modules, search modules, and a document-management platform. Technically SP was released approximately in 2002 and is operating here as version 3, but its many components have a complex pedigree.	Plone is an open-source content management system and associated third-party products. First released in 2001, our planned deployment is with version 3.1, now stable for over 6 months.
SharePoint sites are functionally ASP.NET 2.0 web applications, which are served using IIS and a SQL Server database. All site content data, such as items in document libraries and lists, are stored within an SQL database.	Functionally Plone is a Python application running behind Apache in our case with a Zope database/server backend. Most site content data are stored within Zope.
Requires significant ASP.NET hand coding for modification; SharePoint Designer for customization.	Customization of data types and workflows managed through UML models; standard CSS plus page templates for look-and-feel changes.
SharePoint has an Internet Explorer–based user interface with somewhat limited functionality available to users of other browsers.	Plone is well regarded for its platform independence and browser neutrality.
SharePoint has non-trivial license fees and these are passed to line organizations as indirect costs. Direct costs of content creation and site management are still incurred.	Plone is licensed under the Gnu Public License and has no distribution fees. Costs are only those directly associated with site creation, administration, and content creation or management.
Section 508 Compliance can be achieved with SharePoint, but doing so typically requires substantial development effort, or the use of third-party products. Of particular concern in SharePoint are the use of a number of ActiveX browser plugin controls, the use of non-compliant markup, and over-dependence on client-side scripting.	Plone excels in standards compliance, accessibility (Section 508 compliance), and internationalization.
Unusable sites surprisingly easy to create by the unwary. Awkward to restructure sites at a later time.	Multiple means of organization and navigation available. Moving items does not break internal references. Full-text search available out of the box.
By means of VPN into our internal network or implemented as a site on the external network.	Accessible equally from internal or external networks. Single-sign-on anticipated shortly.
Restructuring a SharePoint site is complex and time-consuming. Data aggregation tasks are extremely complex.	Plone can be customized and extended to meet highly specific needs in terms of data aggregation, site structure, content types, workflow rules, and so forth.
Superior MS Office integration, but difficult to adjust workflow to more complex situations.	Third-party desktop products give Plone drag-and-drop capabilities. Version 3 will have inline editing.
Lacks automatic templating of web pages.	Page templating enforced out of the box.
Non-corporate external SharePoint user accounts must be managed via our internal password-control tools.	Non-corporate user credentials managed simply and locally. Very fine-grained security controls.
Both internal and external versions available with full corporate IT support.	Acceptable for OUO on our external servers. Considered much more secure than PHP-based content management systems. Supported by in-house developers.

(These Blogger table formats are really bothering me today. I've posted the full table at Google Docs.)

Reviews, Resources, and Links

A Plone-based intranet solution compared with SharePoint
SharePoint at NASA and why they went with Plone instead (2008) by K. Cunningham
Disney replaces SharePoint with Plone (2006)
Plone vs Microsoft SharePoint Server (2008) by F. Ciriaci
Plone vs Microsoft SharePoint Server, part 2 (2009) by F. Ciriaci
Jazkarta summary of Plone & SharePoint
SharePoint at Wikipedia
Plone at Wikipedia
Feature comparison

Cygnus atratus and CMS

2009-08-30T08:06:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me a copy of Taleb's book, The Black Swan, and I've been giving it a read. One might wonder where a discussion of extreme events fits with Plone and CMS in general and I hope to close that loop before I'm finished today.

Let's start with a concrete example: the Dec. 2004 Sumatran earthquake and tsunami. Without getting into a debate about whether large earthquakes are true black swan events, this certainly fit the bill for millions of affected people.

In Nov. just prior to that, Enfold Systems launched Oxfam America's newly designed Plone portal. From an item at AllBusiness.com,

"In the course of ten days during the Tsunami crisis, Oxfam had almost half of its typical yearly visits, and almost 1/3 of its yearly bandwidth -- the system performed beautifully," said Internet Manager Nicholas Rabinowitz.

Oxfam raised $14M and credited Plone with a large part of making it possible to handle the scale of the relief response. Clearly this is an example of an enormous negative black swan event for people in the Indian Ocean basin, but a positive black swan event for Plone. This is exactly what Taleb promulgates as a successful strategy for managing risk--maximize your exposure to positive black swans.

Let's take this concept a step farther back and look at the general CMS environment. In the first decade of the 21st Century, we've seen CMS go from twinkle in someone's eye to dozens of major systems. The diffusion of the CMS innovation has been marked by a rapid evolutionary radiation into hundreds of web niches.

Many CMS niches are characterized by what are called path dependencies and network externalities. A path dependency explains how one set of decisions is constrained by what previous decisions. Vendor lock-in is a classic case in point that results in positive feedback for a particular, although possibly suboptimal, solution.

An organization that has drunk the Microsoft coolaid may very likely go with SharePoint as their document management solution and try to foist that off as a web publishing solution as well. But the original choice to go with MS may be a black swan in that it was a very rare, high consequence event from a software perspective.

Network externalities are where outside events drive a decision. Often this means that someone makes a decison to implement a particular CMS because its considered easier to find PHP programmers. (Don't get me started on the ease of learning Python and the readability of Python code.) What was the black swan that led to PHP predominance in web apps? I would hazard that the success of Apache running largely on Unix with tools like AWK led straight to second generation software like Perl and PHP.

I'm now seeing items in the innovation literature that point to yet a third factor that drives acceptance: lack of information. This lack of information on the relative merits of systems leads decision-makers to base their choices on whatever data chance has delivered to them. I've heard this refered to as the "PC Magazine-Air Travel Model," where a manager's decision is based on whatever he or she read in PC Magazine while flying back from DC.

In conclusion, I can't say I believe everything that a catastrophist like Taleb writes. As an evolutionary biologist, I'm well aware of the impact of catastrophies on evolving systems (for example, asteroids and K-T extinctions). But I feel the overall grist in the mill of complex systems is the day-to-day micro-improvements, whether a small favorable mutation or a PLIP solved by a Plone developer. Black swans are out there and we want to be the lucky ones who seize the opportunities they bring, but that doesn't mean I'll stop working on the small, almost unnoticed improvements that drive system change.

Meaningful Stats?

2009-08-23T20:15:00.000-07:00

Dylan Jay recently asked on the Plone Evangelism msg board, "Are there any stats about Plone's success that are really meaningful?" My first thought was to reply over there. But since the question is truly existential from a statistician's point of view as well as being of general interest, I thought I'd post a reply out in the wider blogosphere.

Dylan had also queried in his post by wondering if there's a way of determining amalgamated Plone revenue? His reasoning went that as a community, are there numbers that can compare apples with apples when looking across open-source and commercial products?

The difficulty here is that any single measure we pick will be integrating across multiple dimensions: large customer companies vs small, community sites vs web publishing, dot com's vs dot org's, and so on. In this blog I've explored (and continue to explore) various surrogates for the health of Plone and related CMS's.

Whether its PageRank at Amazon, BuiltWith percentages, Google trends, security vulnerabilities, Plone.net sites, Technorati posts, CMS Matrix features, or other statistical tidbit, these all fall short. Which is why I've always advocated a requirements-based decision process for determining if Plone is right for a particular situation. But that doesn't stop me from questing for the Holy Grail of web statistics--a simple way to measure effectiveness.

I'm still of the opinion that an aggregated set of metrics will be useful in this regard. See for example, one of my earliest posts where I was trying to fill in the gaps in a table where widespread adoption of Plone was based on acceptance and visibility. One of the attributes of acceptance was the economic health of 3rd party companies, something we still don't have a solid handle on (sorry Dylan).

Meanwhile, there are new "sentiment analysis" tools coming out as per this morning's NY Times. Of the free services, things look pretty rough. For example, Twitrratr lists as a negative post this tweat from our very Plone-positive friends in Pennsylvania, "xml is the wrong language for confi..." This confuses a post's source (planet Plone) with the keyword "wrong" and misses the subject of the negative feelings, "XML." The algorithms still need work, but here in the interest of fairness is a rundown.

	Postive	Neutral	Negative
Twitrratr	9.09%	87.66%	3.25%
Twendz	30%	59%	11%
Tweetfeel	0%	n/a	100%

Clearly Twitrratr is displaying more precision than their algorithm merits and Tweetfeel (with n = 2) is missing most of the traffic of interest. Twendz does give a few details on how they are dynamically processing up to the latest 70 tweets. I'll keep an eye on these and related products to see how the technology is maturing and how it can help the Plone community improve itself.

Finally, in closing today I thought I'd finish up not with more statistics, but with a couple anecdotal items recently seen on Twitter:

Collaboration via Sharepoint is like kissing a warthog in August.

and

Trying to create a good site with MS SharePoint... cumbersome... I rather prefer Plone! #microsoft #plone.

Anecdotal evidence by definition isn't statistically significant and can be easily dismissed by those who need numbers to back up their decisions, but it occurs to me that I should be cataloging these sorts of statements. In time, I suspect we'll have quite a corpus because Plone does good stuff.

Next week: The diffusion of innovation and why people often standardize on sub-optimal solutions. Black swans, path dependence, network externalities, and the lack of information on the relative merits of systems.

World-wide Hourly Site Usage

2009-08-15T03:07:00.000-07:00

This past Thursday I had an opportunity to attend the monthly NM Tech Council's meeting. The topic was "Inside Google Analytics." The speaker was Chris Kenworthy, the owner of MediaGroup1 LLC and founder of DreamInCode.net, a leading online community for programmers and web developers.

After his very informative talk, I asked him about a question that has been vexing me for some time: How to untangle visits to Plone.org throughout the day when we have a world-wide community of users? I had thought that perhaps there was a local time dimension hidden somewhere.

Turns out that the solution is different than I'd thought but elegant. The trick is to use geographical areas instead of timezones.

Here's the result. Asia-Oceania is orange, the Americas are green, and Europe-Africa is Yellow. This gives us a very rough cut at timezones.

If we'd wanted finer resolution, we'd have used narrower bands of countries, but for this example plus-0r-minus 5 hours or so works well without a lot of effort.

Here's the how-to.

First, create advanced segments that match timezones.

This is done under Settings | Advanced Segments (beta).
Click on "Create new custom segment."
At this point click on "Visitors" to expand the dimension list.
Scroll down to the dimension of interest, in my case "Continent."
Drag "Continent" onto the dotted box labeled "Dimension or Metric." Use regions or countries for higher resolution.
Leave the condition as "Matches exactly."
From the Value pull-down select, for example, "Europe." (True, this includes data from extreme eastern Russia, but we're keeping this simple.)
Click on "Add 'or' statement."
Repeat for a Value of "Africa" to include everyone in approximately UTC 0 to 4. Your segment should look something like the figure below.
Save the segment under a meaningful name.
Repeat for other geographical bands that represent the time slices you are interested in.

Now we can view our data.

Back at the dashboard, select Visitors | Pageviews (or whatever y-axis value you like).
Select the "Hour" icon.
Set your date range.
Using the (Beta) Advanced Segments pull-down in the upper right, check the boxes for your custom segments.
Click "Apply" and, voila! you have our graph above. Remember that the hourly times given are Google Standard Time, aka San Francisco or UTC -8.

What can we learn from this?

In Europe and Africa, interestingly, we see dual peaks at 10:00 and at 13:00-15:00.

In North America, there's only a single peak around 11:00. Perhaps if I graph North American usage by states, I'll see a lunchtime dip, but our fastfood lunch hours may be showing up.

In Asia and Oceania I may have lumped things together too coarsely. Here there's a broad maximum from about 18:00 until 2:00 in the morning, which corresponds very roughly to mid-day when adjusted for UTC offset. I should go back and create two or three more segments. One would be an east Asia segment for Japan, Korea, China, Australia, and New Zealand. A second would be Indian, Pakistan, and other central Asian countries. A third might be southeast Asia.

So there you have it, hourly data from Analytics for a world-wide audiance. Enjoy!

SharePoint Article in the New York Times

2009-08-09T02:02:00.000-07:00

This morning's New York Times has an important article for all CMS developers -- a discussion of what and where MS SharePoint is. Of particular note is SP's success while MS sales overall have fallen for the first time in history.

“SharePoint is saving Microsoft’s Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in,” said Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco, which makes an open-source content management system. “It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping.”

Apparently, MS will be releasing a new version next year and Ballmer is quoted as saying SharePoint could be the next MS operating system.

Microsoft has managed to undercut even the panoply of open-source companies playing in the business software market by giving away a free basic license to SharePoint if they already have Windows Server. “It’s a brilliant strategy that mimics open source in its viral, free distribution, but transcends open source in its ability to lock customers into a complete, not-free-at-all Microsoft stack - one for which they’ll pay more and more the deeper they get into SharePoint,” Mr. Asay said.

The article mentions a Norwegian start-up, Fast Search and Transfer, as the key to increased SharePoint search capability. Those crafty Norwegians are everywhere :-)

Packt Open Source CMS Candidates

2009-08-03T20:58:00.000-07:00

Interestingly, the Packt OS CMS Nomination forms have pre-populated pull-down menus. For those who care about such minutiae, here are the pre-approved CMSs in the Overall CMS category and, following that, the Other CMS category. Packt has pre-approved 65 CMSs for the overall group and 15 for the others. To put that in perspective, CMS Matrix lists 1017 CMSs.

By "other" Packt means non-PHP, so right off the bat, as in previous years, we've got ecclesiastical differences. I should also note that their Hall of Fame Award this year is limited to the two previous overall winners, Drupal and Joomla, plus whoever is this year's winner.

Without further ado, here are the lucky few who got their tickets pre-punched by Packt. So many CMSs; so little time.

Overall CMS

Alfresco
BigAce
Bitweaver
CMS Made Simple
Concrete5
Covide
CushyCMS
dotCMS
DotNetNuke
e107
EasyHP CMS
Elielton
Enano CMS
eXo Platform ECM
Exponent CMS
Expression Engine
eZ Publish
FlatNuke
FuzzyLime
Hippo
ImpresCMS
InfoGlue
Jamroom
Lanius CMS
Liferay
Lifetype
Mambo
MiaCMS
MODx
Mojo Portal
Moodle
Movable Type
MySource Matrix
Nuxeo
Onokazu
OpenCms
php fusion
PHPboost
PHPWCMS
Pligg
Plone
PyLucid
Radiant
Redaxo
Serendipity
Silva
Silverstripe
SkyPortal
Snews
Social Web CMS
Spip
TikiWiki CMS/Groupware
TYPO3
TYPOlight
Umbraco CMS
Unclassified NewsBoard (UNB)
WebGUI
Website Baker
Wordpress
Xaraya
XOOPS
YACS
Zikula
Zite
ZMS

Other CMS

Alfresco
Apache Lenya
Cuyahoga
DotNetNuke
Hippo CMS
Liferay
Mojo Portal
Movable Type
OpenCms
Plone CMS
PyLucid
Silva CMS
SkyPortal
WebAPP
WebGUI

Nominations Open Monday

2009-08-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

Packt announced that nominations for their 2009 Open Source CMS Awards will open on Monday 3 August. Nominations continue through September 11 and final voting runs September 21 through October 30. The award winners will be announced November 9. The Packt OS CMS Awards are entering their fourth year and their process is still changing each year, but it seems to be stabilizing.

Get out their and mobilize your OS community. Plone has done well in the "Other CMS" category and has been a contender for best overall in past years. Placing well with the Packt Awards does give some nice publicity immediately on the tails of this year's World Plone Conference.

Trends from Builtwith

2009-08-01T15:08:00.000-07:00

I just found BuiltWith Trends, which has some interesting CMS data among other things. My understanding is that they sample a large (but unspecified) number of domains and determine the web technology used. Looks like they're only publishing data beginning late last November.

The graph here definitely puts the Google Trends stats in perspective. I've extracted the individual data for a couple CMS and compiled them into one chart. It turns out that Joomla and Plone each account for a tiny fraction (<0.02%), whereas Google Trends shows Joomla far outstripping Drupal. Speaking of Drupal, they just recently scrabbled above 1.0% after bottoming out at 0.70% last Christmas.

At the bottom of each technology page is a pie chart showing how the last survey slices the entire domain, in this case, CMS. Drupal's 1.35% is 38.5% of all CMSs surveyed. Joomla comes in with 5.13% and Plone has 1.71%. In terms of ranking, Drupal is on top, Joomla is fifth, and Plone ties for eighth.

BuiltWith conveniently lists top sites using a given technology, although I'm not sure how they determine this. Plone's top sites are the CIA, Discover Magazine, ACM, and Connexions. Typically BuiltWith lists a maximum of 20 top sites, so I'm not sure how they missed Oxfam America, NASA Science, and a couple thousand others.

Just to give you an idea of the other's top sites, Drupal's top 4 sites are BrightCove, Us Magazine, iVillage, and NW Source. Joomla's are The Hill, RCN, SpellingCity, and everythingiCafe.

Clicking on a listed site will take you to a summary page that displays all the technologies that BuiltWith was able to extract from the domain in question. Very interesting stuff.

Like all web stats, they are to be used cautiously, all the more so when an explicit methodology is not stated. None-the-less, I'll definitely be following BuiltWith to see how things track over time. There's considerable noise in the data and one can't yet tell a trend from seasonal noise or something associated with a new version rollout.

All that said, this may be as close to market share as we're likely to get in the near future. The numbers don't segment the marketplace, so we still don't know if Plone is killing Drupal or vice versa in the government, education, and not for profit areas. Quite frankly the big surprise for me was that the total usage percent for CMS is only 3.67% of all the sites sampled by BuiltWith. Looks like global domination is still a ways off.

What Makes a Popular CMS?

2009-07-27T17:16:00.000-07:00

This afternoon my good friend over at Boeing sent me a link to Paul Graham's 2001 piece on popular programming languages. You might have heard of Paul--he and Robert Morris wrote the software that drove Yahoo Store, a hugely influential system in 2001.

Considering that he's advocating a new spin on LISP, I thought the analogy would fit well with Plone's circumstances. He has 12 explicit metrics of popularity as they apply to programming languages and one implicit measure--let's see how far I can stretch them to cover CMS.

The implicit metric is very powerful abstractions. Hands down Python, Zope, and Plone blow the others away. An object-oriented database, archetypes/dexterity, Python (instead of Perl/PHP)... the list goes on and on, but let's dive into the 12 explicit measures of popularity.

1. The Mechanics. The mechanism of being popular is poorly understood in the WWW. What makes a video go viral? What does make a CMS popular? Do popular CMS deserve their popularity? Is it worth trying to define a good CMS? How would you do it? Let's look at webmasters and web designers, putting on that lens and seeing what shakes out. (Bear in mind that site users are incredibly important, but they often lack leverage in pre-selecting the underlying CMS.) Here's a quote from Graham with my transliteration from programming languages to CMS in brackets.

It's true, certainly, that most people don't choose [CMSs] simply based on their merits. Most [developers] are told what [CMS] to use by someone else.... So whether or not a [CMS] has to be good to be popular, I think a [CMS] has to be popular to be good. And it has to stay popular to stay good. The state of the art ... doesn't stand still.

2. External Factors. In a chicken-and-egg manner, a popular CMS has to be the underlying system of popular sites. One way to describe this situation is to say that a language isn't judged on its own merits. A CMS does need a good implementation, of course, and this must be free. Companies will pay for software, but individual freelance designer might not, and it's the designers you need to attract.

A language also needs to have a book about it. The book should be thin, well-written, and full of good examples. K&R is the ideal here [for languages, ed.]. At the moment I'd almost say that a language has to have a book published by O'Reilly. That's becoming the test of mattering to hackers.

I would now argue that a book published by Packt is the CMS benchmark. :-)

3. Brevity. Given that you can supply the three things any CMS needs -- a free implementation, a book, and means to rapidly prototype (see below)--how do you make a CMS language that webmasters and designers will like?

Paul makes the point that hackers need a language that is terse and weakly typed for speed of, well, hacking. Interestingly, he emphasizes that white space matters, which of course is a Python trademark. Referring to the LISP commands car and cdr:

And they are also different lengths, meaning that the arguments won't line up when they're called, as car and cdr often are, in successive lines. I've found that it matters a lot how code lines up on the page.

4. Usability. Graham, referring to programming languages, calls this hackability. There is one thing more important than brevity to a web designer: being able to do what you want--in our case, creating websites. I believe this translates into usability, another huge asset with Plone.

A recent blog post by PJ Grisel takes (IMHO unfair) aim at, among other things, Plone usability. But when I get desperate calls from the SharePoint user upstairs, I realize how smooth things are running in the Plone world.

5. Rapid Prototyping. Graham labels his 5th measure throwaway programs, which translates to prototyping in my world. To be attractive to site builders, a CMS must be good for building the kinds of sites they need to produce, which are often quick off-the-cuff demos for prospective customers.

What makes a [CMS] good for throwaway [systems]? To start with, it must be readily available. A throwaway [web portal] is something that you expect to write in an hour. So the [CMS] probably must already be installed on the computer you're using. It can't be something you have to install before you use it. It has to be there.

This often is the case when it comes to creating CMS-based websites on inexpensive, dare I say, cheap, LAMP servers. That said, the Plone installers get you up and running in less than 15 minutes on your desktop. With minimal instruction, a site designer can be customizing a functional prototype in evening.

That huge learning curve that everyone talks about may just turn out to be a myth. Heavy customization may take you deep into the bowels of Zope, but I rarely need more than CSS, ArgoUML, and cursory Python ability to produce wonderfully sophisticated portals. One doesn't need to know eight frameworks to be able to deploy a Plone site.

6. Libraries. Graham continues with the topic of libraries, which might be the equivalent of products in Plone.

Of course the ultimate in brevity is to have the program already written for you, and merely to call it. And this brings us to what I think will be an increasingly important feature of programming languages: library functions. Perl wins because it has large libraries for manipulating strings.

Python remains an strong contender here with its excellent libraries for manipulating not only strings but HTML, XML, and SQL. Since 1998 I've not gone data mining without my HTMLlib.

Back on track with CMS and Plone products, we are seeing some real maturity in key add-ons. Jazkarta's recent post ("May I borrow that?") about the products that make Oxfam America rock is very welcome.

7. Syntax. Sorry folks, I'm open to nominations as to what exactly the CMS equivalent of syntax might be. Its certainly a higher order concept having to do with the rules that apply to languages. In a CMS, this might transcend the underlying framework and relate to site organization, navigation, and how to make content meaningful (and possibly searchable). Comments welcome on this topic.

8. Efficiency. While speed of a language is one thing, speed of a website is another altogether.

As Knuth pointed out long ago, speed only matters in certain critical bottlenecks. And as many programmers have observed since, one is very often mistaken about where these bottlenecks are.

The nature of speed, as perceived by the end-user, may be changing. With the rise of server-based applications, more and more programs may turn out to be i/o-bound. It will be worth making i/o fast. The language can help with straightforward measures like simple, fast, formatted output functions, and also with deep structural changes like caching and persistent objects.

Users are interested in response time. But another kind of efficiency will be increasingly important: the number of simultaneous users you can support per processor. Many of the interesting applications written in the near future will be server-based, and the number of users per server is the critical question for anyone hosting such applications. In the capital cost of a business offering a server-based application, this is the divisor.

Nuff said.

9. Time. Graham discusses time in a novel way and reflects on "the garage guys" (open source) and the "big bang approach" (commercial).

The last ingredient a popular [CMS] needs is time. No one wants to [develop sites using a framework] that might go away, as so many [CMSs] do. So most [designers] will tend to wait until a [CMS] has been around for a couple years before even considering using it.

The good news is, simple repetition solves the problem. All you have to do is keep telling your story, and eventually people will start to hear. It's not when people notice you're there that they pay attention; it's when they notice you're still there.

If you look at the dominant technologies today, you'll find that most of them grew organically.

Plone continues to grow organically and still gains ground in important areas like government web portals. In my day-job we've been "ramen profitable" for several years, where we don't need to raise funds for the web team to survive. And now that our skunk works has been around for five years, people are standing up and taking notice. People are listening to the story. (BTW, see Graham's July 2009 essay for more on ramen profitability.)

10. Redesign. The concept of redesigning certainly resonates with the current Plone community. 3.3 is out there, 4.0 expected by Christmas, and 5.0 PLIPs are already coming thick and fast. Graham has a great description of a two-cycle innovation engine:

In the first phase of the two-cycle innovation engine, you work furiously on some problem, inspired by your confidence that you'll be able to solve it. In the second phase, you look at what you've done in the cold light of morning, and see all its flaws very clearly. But as long as your critical spirit doesn't outweigh your hope, you'll be able to look at your admittedly incomplete system, and think, how hard can it be to get the rest of the way?

11. Plone. Of course Graham expounds the virtues of LISP in his 11th point. Here I include some quotes from another of his 2001 articles, The Other Road Ahead:

When we look back on the desktop software era, I think we'll marvel at the inconveniences people put up with, just as we marvel now at what early car owners put up with. For the first twenty or thirty years, you had to be a car expert to own a car.

There is now another way to deliver software that will save users from becoming system administrators. Web-based applications are programs that run on Web servers and use Web pages as the user interface. For the average user this new kind of software will be easier, cheaper, more mobile, more reliable, and often more powerful than desktop software.

With Web-based software, most users won't have to think about anything except the applications they use. All the messy, changing stuff will be sitting on a server somewhere, maintained by the kind of people who are good at that kind of thing.

When you install software on your desktop computer, you can only use it on that computer. Worse still, your files are trapped on that computer.

Think back on Plone in 2001... now reflect on where we are today. CMS have freed the user's files that were trapped on that desktop, or worse still, trapped in that maze of mirrors people call their shared drives. While web developers have to worry about the details under the hood, to continue the metaphore, our users, our content providers are getting more and more power, convenience, and usability. Web designers are the ones who must put structure, order, organization, and context into the content provided. Plone can't do that for them (yet :-)).

12. The Dream System. Paul has a more recent essay about "The Power of the Marginal." In it he has some remarks that the Plone community can take comfort in when others make Plone and Zope's edge technology an issue (and complain about the name of your visual editor). When someone next drags out the Google Trends graph for Drupal-Joomla-Plone, take heart:

This leads to my final suggestion: a technique for determining when you're on the right track. You're on the right track when people complain that you're unqualified, or that you've done something inappropriate. If people are complaining, that means you're doing something rather than sitting around, which is the first step. And if they're driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means you've probably done something good.

If you make something and people complain that it doesn't work, that's a problem. But if the worst thing they can hit you with is your own status as an outsider, that implies that in every other respect you've succeeded. Pointing out that someone is unqualified is as desperate as resorting to racial slurs. It's just a legitimate sounding way of saying: we don't like your type around here.

But the best thing of all is when people call what you're doing inappropriate. I've been hearing this word all my life and I only recently realized that it is, in fact, the sound of the homing beacon. "Inappropriate" is the null criticism. It's merely the adjective form of "I don't like it."

So that, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal. Be inappropriate. When you hear people saying that, you're golden. And they, incidentally, are busted.

Summer Amazon Numbers and Other Bits

2009-07-21T02:00:00.000-07:00

I'm a little past due with my usual Amazon sales rank stats this month... the dog days of summer are taking their toll. Our top ranking text is Practical Plone 3 (remember, small Amazon sales ranks are good). I've thinned things out by omitting most of the 2008 data (see my March posting for all that) and that reduces much of the chatter.

Overall, things are holding their own. Practical Plone 3 is still ahead of the pack with a sales rank of 151,532. I should point out that average customer review ratings (not shown) are uniformly high (4.5-5) except for Cooper and Meloni.

I recently ran across a tool called Wikirank that gives you a count of the number of times a Wikipedia page was accessed over the previous 30 days. The numbers for some popular CMS and blogging systems look like this.

CMS	Wikirank
Drupal	40,589
Joomla	36,403
WordPress	24,141
MediaWiki	18,299
SharePoint	15,795
Plone	6,177

I'm not at all sure what these mean--SharePoint and Plone at the bottom, Drupal and Joomla at the top. It definitely doesn't track Google Trends, where WordPress and Joomla are huge relative to Drupal. At any rate, I'll keep tracking this over time and periodically popping up with a summary.

Just in passing, for those of you who watch the ASP world, back in June asp.netPRO announced its 2009 Readers' Choice Award Winners. These were based on voting concluded last April. Geoff Spick makes some interesting observations at his blog on the fact that SharePoint took the prize for best CMS even though Microsoft has been touting it instead as a document collaboration and productivity platform. DotNetNuke came in second.

Twone

2009-07-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

I've been following Twitter more closely this year than ever before, partly because I was involved in getting Sandia National Laboratories to get with the program and authorize a corporate @SandiaLabs feed. Since then I've set up Twilerts to give me a daily "Plone" summary and my Tweetdeck is doing passing well.

I've noticed that there have been lots of positive tweets regarding Plone, but every day or so, there's a flaming remark about someone who's gone up on a reef with Plone. Lots of folks hop into the breech, but I'll have to say, Alexander tends to be ever the diplomat, reaching out as per this sample:

[name withheld]: pox on plone 2:39 AM Jul 2nd from web

limi4plone: [@name withheld] If Plone has a disease, we need to cure it. ;) Anything we can do to help?

Of course, its deucedly hard to diagnose a problem in 140 characters. I'm particularly frustrated by the ones asking, "Which is better, Plone or Drupal?" When asked for requirements so one can make an intelligent stab at what they need, they vanish. I suppose if I was the perfect Plone advocate, I should have simply tweeted back, "Plone is best... always," which ultimately causes more problems.

Then in today's NY Times I find an article on using Twitter to get better customer service. Turns out, as we've always known, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. Here's a sample:

Mr. Wagner suspects he received better service because of Twitter’s viral nature. Twitterers habitually “re-tweet” one another’s posts, not unlike forwarding an e-mail message to everyone in your address book. Companies, he said, “want to head off the conversation as quickly as possible,” adding, that “it’s in their best interest to make people who have a pulpit happy.”
JetBlue puts a more positive spin on it. Disgruntled customers “tend to be the biggest opportunities,” said Morgan Johnston, a spokesman for the airline who helps manage its Twitter account, which has more than 770,000 followers. “We can take that person aside and kind of pull them in and say, ‘Hey, you seem to be really upset in front of several hundred or thousand people.’ ”

Twitter is an amazing tool for situational awareness, but my guess is that it needs to be better integrated with other streams of communication. As the Times article points out, Twitter can get the attention of customer service, but rarely can it solve the problem.

Community-Powered Plone

2009-06-28T02:38:00.001-07:00

I came across an article in the May 9 ScienceNews that described, among other interesting things, decision-making in bee swarms. It occurs to me that the same thing may be going on in OSS as communities of developers and users attempt to agree on which new features to include in the next release, what "the best CMS" is, or reach some other collective decision.

The process is that a fairly small number of more experienced bees act as scouts. When they find a candidate location for a new hive, they return to the swarm and perform a dance that indicates the distance, direction, and perceived quality of the potential home. Based on the more enthusiastic dances, additional scouts sample the recommended locations. If they like a site, they too will communicate that to the hive. Amazingly, they usually attain a consensus within a day or two.
In the illustration above, location B (blue) is initially the hot place to be out of about seven candidates. But over a period of hours, location G (gold) appears and overtakes all the contenders. At that point the swarm heads off to their new digs.

Is this (or a high tech version of this) happening via the web? Are OSS advocates dancing their tails off, trying to convince the other scouts and eventually the entire swarm to follow their lead? It may be a plausible model.

Interestingly, if the bees can't reach a consensus, the swarm may split. Mambo/Joomla, anyone? Does this mean bees can have two different use-cases?

At any rate, from a Plone point of view, I urge the community to make sure to drop in on the Plone Evangelism forum, participate, spread the good word, dance your dance for the entire swarm, and change the world for the better.

Launchpad Stats

2009-06-08T02:36:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Sidnei da Silva, I've been made aware that Launchpad is now publishing download statistics. https://edge.launchpad.net/plone/3.2/3.2.2 has the latest, apparently accumulated only since February 2009.

The Launchpad stats show 255,710 downloads of which 188,298 are for the unified installer for Linux/BSD/Solaris/OSX. 64,496 are downloads for the Windows buildout. The small fraction remaining are for the OSX installer or downloads without Zope or Python.

Converting these to percentages reveals 25% of Plone 3.2.2 downloads were for Windows boxes; 74% for *nix.

As interesting as these numbers may be, its a long leap from downloads to installation base. Our three venerable 2.5.5 instances only required one download and resulted in two dozen portals being developed. On the other hand, at the College of Santa Fe, I'd have 16 students each download the Windows installer just for an evening's exercise.

From my point of view, the good news of the week has been the release of funds to upgrade our server to 3.2.2. That means all our new Plone portals will roll out in 3.2. If existing portal projects fund their migration either this summer or fall, we'll be just in time for next winter's 4.0.

Blank Spots in Visitor Loyalty

2009-05-29T01:51:00.000-07:00

While things are hopping over at Plone Symposium East, I thought I'd finish up my series on Plone.org visitor statistics from Google Analytics. Tonight I'd like to discuss several under-appreciated metrics: loyalty, recency, length of visit, and depth of visit. I'm inspired by a blog posting by Avinash Kaushik that promulgated these measures for non-e-commerce websites.

Loyalty. Plone.org visitor loyalty has four modes, a mode being a local maxima in the frequency graph. A huge number of visitors (51%) come to the site only once, but then there is an up-tick after 8 visits. Of those, there is another up-tick after 25 and another after 200. From the graph, one would suspect that visitors returning more than 8 times represent a distinct population.

The long and the short of it is that Plone.org updates its content frequently with new documentation and products coming online daily. Returning visitors who come back over 200 times are clearly deeply interested in Plone. Even those who revisit just 9 times probably are users of a Plone site or owners of a simple Plone portal who need more than just a single answer to a question or the one-time download of an online reference book.

Recency. Fully 82% of all Plone.org visitors came within the past 24 hours. There is also a noticable peak in the "8-14 days ago" visitor population. These are routine visitors who make a habit of returning to Plone.org 2-4 times per month. As an action item, should the Plone community “sell” harder the value of repeat visits to our audience?

Length of Visit. About 55% of all visitors stay for less than 10 seconds. Obviously they were looking for something else and instantly recognized that their search had taken them too far afield. Of those who stayed more than a few seconds, 22% stayed for 1-3 minutes, 23% for 3-10 minutes, and 21% for 10-30 minutes.

This seems to indicate that about equal numbers of site visitors find their answer or locate their download within 180 seconds, within 300 seconds, or within a half hour. Considering the number of brief how-to's as well as the length of some tutorials, this probably is to be expected. A laudable goal for Plone.org might be to increase the under one minute population, which would indicate that site users found their answers quicker.

Kaushik states that "If you are a support website then should you be embarrassed if 20% of your audience was on the site for more than ten minutes!" Reducing the number of 10-30 minute visitors would be another excellent goal for Plone.org. That would mean that solutions to problems were becoming simpler and no longer needed lengthy, detailed tutorials. That said, I think there will always be a need for comprehensive tutorials that explain a process from start to finish in complete detail.

Of course, these metrics fail to capture those Plone users who are able to answer their own questions just due to the high usability of the Plone sites without needing to look up any online references.

Depth of Visit. As might be expected, 50% of all visitors stop after a single page. These no doubt correspond to the 51% of single-time visitors, the same ones who stay less than 10 seconds.

You'll note, however, that this is bimodal with almost 5% of all site users viewing 20 or more pages. I'm guessing these are developers and power users.

Its a testimony to Plone's internal search engine that visitors who stay beyond a single page view find what they're looking for (or if you're a pessimist, they give up) within a handful of pages. Turns out the average is 2.6 pages. That's about right for the following use-case: go to Plone.org, enter a search term, view the results page, select a relevant result and view it.

This concludes my "Blank Spots in..." tour of Plone.org statistics from Google Analytics. I'll try to get back every six months or so and see if things are moving around. With all the recent changes to the home page, I would expect to see some metrics on the move and in a positive way.

Blank Spots in the Week

2009-05-19T01:10:00.001-07:00

Last week I took a brief look at some Plone demographics along with some pageview observations. Tonight I'm taking a gander at the periodicity of visits to Plone.org. Here's the graph of visits over time.

I've identified the maximum (A) and two minima (B). The maximum is easily explained--Tuesday August 21, 2007 was the rollout date for Plone 3.0. The minima are also easily explained--the annual December holidays, Christmas through New Year's.

What of the sawtooth pattern? Its the weekly periodicity of activity. Week in and week out, Plone visitors peak early (Monday or Tuesday) and taper off significantly on Saturday and Sunday.

The hourly data (below) show an up-tick beginning at midnight with another rise around 0700. (All times are Google Standard Time, that is, -0700 GMT.) That first rise coincides with Europe going to work and the second bump begins as the eastern seaboard of the Americas gets going. Things taper off as the west coast closes up shop.

From all this we can conclude that the general Plone population of visitors are not overwhelmingly hobbyists. Both annual and weekly patterns support the view that working professionals are using Plone.org with down time for weekends and annual holidays. The hourly data reinforce this with the pattern matching that of the working hours for Plone's largest populations, Europe and the Americas.

My last observation is the remarkable consistency in visits. There's no need for regression on that first figure--its obvious to the eye. Plone.org visits have been incredibly steady, except for the periodicities noted above, ever since data has been tracked by Google Analytics.

For those who look at Google trends and claim that Plone is declining and becoming a niche player in the CMS market, this is the strongest data I've seen that refutes that position. Plone.org visits over time show a strong and consistant population of visitors, the majority of which are professional.

Furthermore, one would expect most visits for support (see last week's post) to occur during the development of new sites. As sites enter stable production mode and support visits drop off, other new sites must be cropping up to replace them. The horizontal trend line of Plone.org visitors is an indicator that new sites are being created at a fairly steady rate over a several year period.

For those who would argue that the horizontal trend is simply the same band of loyalists hitting the site day after day, stay tuned. More to come on visitor loyalty in my next post, as I continue to probe Plone.org's statistics.

World Plone Day

2009-05-01T04:02:00.000-07:00

Happy May Day. This morning's post is a collection of miscellany while my main article on Plone.org statistics cooks on a back burner.

For anyone who hosted a WPD event last week, kindly take a moment to fill out the simple survey form that is collecting data on the many different events out there. The current results only show Istanbul, Albuquerque, Pisa, Taipei, Paris, and Cologne. Thanks.

I found an interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald about CMS, especially FOSS vs subscription services, by Valerie Khoo. That in turn has lead to a lively discussion at CMS Report that continues up to this week.

CMS Wire is staying on top of things and I see they have a new end-of-the-month feature looking at what's up and coming in the month ahead. They made mention of both Plone symposia and it's always good to get press like that.

Web Hosting Geeks has an article that in its own way reiterates my own position: let requirements drive your CMS decision. The article discusses WordPress vs Joomla, but frankly one could just as easily strike out WordPress and replace it with Drupal or SharePoint and switch Joomla for Plone.

In an unrelated item, Packt just rolled out their author website, which may inspire some to pick up their virtual pen and write that book. Of interest to me is Packt's announcement of their 2009 Author Awards. Voting is now open but the rules limit contenders to authors of new or revised titles from 2008. With several new Plone titles coming out this year, plan on this being a hot item next year for the 2010 Author Awards.

In closing I'd like to thank Nate Aune, Jon Stahl, Chris Johnson, David Brenneman, Ross Patterson, and Alexander Limi for their hard work at the NTEN Conference this past week. From the looks of the online material at NTEN it was a great conference. I wish I'd kept better notes on the Twittersphere this week--there was a noticible up-tick in positive traffic that I attribute to the Plone booth at NTEN. I also note that there's now a Plone twibe at http://twibes.com/plone.

Blank Spots on the Map

2009-04-29T01:22:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd take a look at the geographical distribution of Plone interest tonight. I can see the breakdown of visits to Plone.org by continent as per Google Analytics (from an arbitrary sample of a month's worth of data). What is not apparent is how these regions stack up per capita. Here's the table with percentage of world population added.

Continent	Pop Pct	Plone	Ratio
Asia	61%	11%	0.2
Africa	14%	2%	0.1
Americas	13%	39%	2.9
Europe	11%	44%	4.0
Oceania	0.4%	3%	6.9

I've calculated the ratio of each regions Plone percentage to its population percentage. You can imagine that if a particular region had a ratio of 1.0 it would mean that its proportion of Plone.net visitors was equal to that region's fraction of the world population.

What we see is that Oceania has much more than its "fair share" (thank you, Australia and New Zealand), while Asia and Africa are much under represented. This also shows that, while Plone is popular in the Americas, it is still a Eurocentric CMS.

And while I'm poking around in Google Analytics, here's the breakdown by browser type.

Browser	Percent
Firefox	60%
IE	21%
Safari	9%
Chrome	4%
Other	6%

Not really a surprise that an open-source community would attract users of open-source browsers.

Now let's see what sort of pageviews Plone.org has. Thankfully, Analytics not only displays pageviews, but unique pageviews. For a thoughtful discussion of the difference, please see Kaushik's Standard Metrics Revisited. Here's one day's percentages.

	Page	Pageviews	Unique Pageviews
1	/	14.89%	11.08%
2	/products	7.10%	4.22%
3	/documentation	5.61%	3.49%
4	/products/plone	3.21%	2.51%
5	/about	1.09%	0.92%
	...
16	/products/by-category/themes	3.25%	0.42%

Pageviews and unique pageviews pretty much track each other except down on line 16 of the report. There theming products have far more pageviews than unique ones. Based on pageviews, "themes" would be ranked 4th. Understandably, people looking for tools to assist with look-and-feel issues for their skins are repeatedly coming back to the "themes" page (an average of 3.25/0.42 or almost 8 times).

Based on this, I'd suggest that we create a grid of screen shot thumbnails so that visitors hunting for a theme could visually browse them all at once. It might look like this:


etc.	etc.	etc.

With appropriate links, it would save a lot of people a lot of clicks. Hmm?? Maybe I should wander over to the Plone.org website forum and volunteer.

Next posting we go beyond pageviews and investigate Plone.org visitor loyalty.

World Plone Day

2009-04-22T02:43:00.000-07:00

I've been following WPD on Twitter. Lots of activity from Japan and even remarks from Malta and Basque country. Haven't seen anything from Australia, New Zealand or India yet. Here in New Mexico things won't kickoff until around 11:00.

If you hosted a WPD event, please hop over to the Google Docs spreadsheet input form where we're collecting participation information. You can view last year's results and see this year's numbers roll in at the spreadsheet itself.
_______________

This year WPD coincides with Earth Day, at least in the U.S. I just Googled for "Earth Day" & Plone. Over 9,000 results, most of them Earth Day events promulgated on Plone-based sites. By way of comparison, "Earth Day" & Drupal returns 29,000 results while Joomla has nearly 65,000. The difficulty of interpretting numbers like these is that SERP doesn't indicate search term affinity, adjacency, or context. A blog like this one mentions "Plone" and "Earth Day," so it turns up in the results, even though its not a Plone-based site.

I am reminded that the City of Albuquerque's "sustainability" section, its original Plone section, is http://www.cabq.gov/albuquerquegreen. Looking forward to meeting up with the City's Plonistas later today. Also looking forward to catching up with the gang from FosterMilo.
_______________

Re: SharePoint blues. Had an interesting call from one of the Megaports folks upstairs early this morning. They needed to move a folder with all its subfolders and content. Turns out to be non-trivial. Moral of the story, in SharePoint you'd better get your information hierarchy right the first time, because after you load up your folder structure, changes become very hard.

By contrast, moving a folder in Plone is a simple cut-and-paste. With an object oriented database under the hood, all the links simply work.
_______________

Re: Drupal blues. More anecdotal evidence turned up yesterday about difficulties with Drupal's security and the strength of Plone's.
_______________

In closing, I thought I'd link to a couple excellent resources about Web statistics from FosterMilo. Thanks, Chantal.

Presentation to UNM's Anderson School of Management
The myth of visitor stats
Segmentation in Google Analytics
Measurement without e-commerce conversion goals

Have a great World Plone Day!

Plone and SharePoint

2009-04-12T21:16:00.000-07:00

Before I get down to business, I thought I'd mention Packt's new release, "Choosing an Open Source CMS: A Beginner's Guide" by Nirav Mehta. At first blush, I was a little put off by the self-demeaning subtitle, but upon reading the Packt material more closely, it looks like anyone in the CMS decison-making hierarchy could stand to give this one a read. At the very least, it repeats my mantra of "Requirements, requirements, requirements" as the first step to solving a problem.

However, without having seen the text, I'm a little worried that it is a marketing ploy for WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. The online material specifically calls those three out when it talks about the book having quick-start guides and examples. It would be a pity that a good concept should be ruined by having pre-conceived solutions that fly in the face of their own advice to let requirements drive the CMS decision.

I wonder where Plone will fall in their section on "CMSs by Breed?" Interestingly, in the final chapter apparently they reiterate the results of the last Packt open source CMS award winners. That certainly opens the door for Plone, but a final call will have to wait until I get my hands on a copy.
________________

Meanwhile, on to tonight's topic: SharePoint. At my day-job I continue to see the corporate SharePoint solution spread (more than 1000 sites currently listed internally). The beauty of a corporate SharePoint is that it has no impact on a project's bottem line--its just another cost subsumed in IT overhead.

That makes our skunkworks of a Plone shop expensive by comparison, since we bill our services directly out of someone's program budget. Even so, Plone offers enough advantages over the alternatives that we stay very busy.

I've had my share of anecdotal evidence about how SharePoint and Plone differ on their implementation, but the sparkplug for all this is Bryan Ruby's CMS Report last month entitled "The Problem is Bigger than SharePoint." Bryan's piece put me on to Thomas Vander Wal's post, "SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools." Both are well thought out articles with a healthy dose of comments from all sides of the issue.

What seems to be drawing in customers are a few key capabilities:

Online forms. PloneFormGen and the ability to permit anonymous submission of completed forms, for example, workshop registration or non-citizen visit request.
Document sharing. Getting the traditional webmaster out of the way so site owners can upload their own content using their own folder hierarchy.
Customizable workflow. Special roles for individuals and groups, perhaps for just a particular subset of the portal.
Unique content types. Archetypes generated from UML models to handle special use-cases.
Versioning. Tracking document revisions really cuts down on e-mail glut.
Flexible theming. The ability to skin a site quickly to either the corporate standard or a particular project's own brand.
Automatic indexing/full-site search. Need I say more.
Broad collection of 3rd party products. The need for questionnaires, surveys, inventories, calendars, wikis, workgroups, and other features are often solved with a product "off-the-shelf."

That's a surprisingly modest list of functions and it seems like SharePoint would do some of these as well as or even better than Plone. But I have to agree with Bryan that SharePoint and many enterprise systems are caught between two worlds and not doing the social collaboration side of the solution well.

Plone Security

2009-04-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

Last week my Twi-alerts tuned me in to an ongoing Twitter discussion between David Strauss and Alexander Limi. Apparently, it started when the Idealware review came out showing Drupal as having a lower security rating than Plone.

The discussion eventually moved to David's blog where he posted the interestingly titled "Drupal's vulnerability reports are not signs of security weakness." There he cited the Google trends numbers comparing Drupal and Plone. Others have since joined in the fray, including the Idealware authors and quite a few others. VH Wouter cited the graphic comparison of security exploits among PHP and Zope-based CMS.

Let me extend the Google Trends observations by adding Typo3 and Joomla so that we have all the players from the exploits graph.

CMS	Color in Graph	Google Average*	Exploits
Plone	Blue	1.0	10
Typo3	Green	2.6	52
Drupal	Red	8.0	164
Joomla	Orange	28.4	265

* 12-mo average with Plone normalized to 1.0

Looks like there's a relationship between Google trends and security exploits. If we graph them, a nice logarithmic pattern becomes apparent.

R-squared is 98%! Now one has to be very careful here... correlation doesn't mean causation. This is one of the most common fallacies in all of statisticdom. Here it is in a nutshell from stats.org:

In general, we should all be wary of our own bias; we like explanations.... Without clear reasons to accept causality, we should only accept correlation. Two events occurring in close proximity does not imply that one caused the other, even if it seems to makes perfect sense.

Maybe many eyes means more detected vulnerabilities means safer software. Maybe all the Google searches are because all the Joomla users are desperately looking for fixes to their security holes.

In the end, I think Alex's comment is as good a way of summarizing things as we are likely to get:

Instead of going for the “Drupal is so popular, all bugs are shallow, that's why we have so many security holes” rhetoric, I’d suggest addressing the list of the 10 most common security vulnerabilities in web applications from OWASP. It’s a good checklist that lists the most common attack vectors for web applications these days. If the PHP-based projects (not just Drupal :) can show how they address these, they are on their way to show that they take security seriously.
Plone’s version is here: http://plone.org/products/plone/security/overview

Another way of looking at this is David Guilhufe's analysis (thanks for the link, Laura):

Four Kitchens seems to suggest that part of the reason for more vulnerabilities in Drupal compared to Plone is that it’s more popular. But, if you’ve been an observer to the Linux/Windows FUD wars, you’ll remember that Microsoft has that exact same argument about why there are more security vulnerabilities in Windows as compared to Linux. And the Linux folks say, in response, “It’s not popularity, it’s design.” I’m sure that Four Kitchens, and most open source software developers agree with that perspective. In reviewing Plone, and talking with people who develop for Plone, I was convinced that the reason that Plone had fewer reported vulnerabilities was not just because it was less popular - it’s because it (and Python and Zope) was more secure by design.

I am completely happy with Drupal’s security (otherwise, it wouldn’t have gotten a “Solid.”) I think the Drupal community takes security extremely seriously, and if they didn’t, I wouldn’t have chosen it as a platform for development. I also think that the Joomla and WordPress communities take security seriously. In our estimation, they were all really good. But Plone was just that much better.

The fact that the Idealware review's remarks on CMS security stirred up so much commentary in the Twittersphere and the Blogosphere speaks well for the entire open-source community. Security is serious business and OSS takes it seriously.

Idealware CMS Report

2009-04-01T21:05:00.000-07:00

No matter what fault you may find with Idealware's recent "Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems," we have a rare jewel in the world of web comparative analysis: a report with a completely documented methodology. Of course, you are welcome to disagree with their ratings, their categories, and their thresholds, but at least they are 100% up front about where the numbers come from. Tip o' the hat to Idealware.

So... down to the nitty gritty. What does the report have to say? The easiest thing to do is take their verbal scores (None, Fair, Solid, Excellent) and convert them to numeric values (0, 1, 2, 3 respectively). The result is a modified version of their comparison chart on page 16 (numbered page 14 due to front matter).

Category	WordPress	Joomla	Drupal	Plone
Hosting/Installation	3	3	3	1
Simple Site Config	3	2	2	2
Complex Site Config	3	3	2	1
Content Admin	3	2	2	3
Graphical Flexibility	3	3	3	3
Structural Flexibility	1	2	3	3
Roles and Workflow	1	1	2	3
Web 2.0	2	2	3	2
Extending and Integrating	2	2	3	3
Scalability/Security	2	2	2	3
Maintenance	3	2	2	2
Support/Community	3	3	3	3
	29	27	30	29

The long and the short of it is that there is only a 10% difference between the bottom (Joomla) and the top (Drupal). WordPress and Plone are only 3% behind the front runner. I'd say that the differences are "in the noise."

Perhaps a better way to approach this is to weigh those comparison categories to match your needs and requirements, run the math, and see what comes out. For example, if security is a big driver (as it is for me), giving it a weighing factor of 2 might be appropriate. Then the final scores are 31, 29, 32, and 33.

But as is so often the case, we're looking at apples and oranges here from the get-go. WordPress is a blogging/collaboration tool, Joomla is a web CMS, Drupal is a complex mixture of both. Plone by virtue of its powerful combination of features is a collaboration system and a web content management system, yet strong enough to do the heavy lifting for an enterprise portal.

Its always nice to see good scores and the fact that Idealware chose Plone along with only 3 other serious open source systems is high praise in and of itself. Idealware should be complimented for having a transparent methodology, a relatively neutral approach, and giving good press to four worthwhile systems.

Still, I can't stress enough that your specific, unique requirements must drive your choice for a CMS. Don't let someone else's numbers blind you to what you and your community of users need to accomplish.

Coming next: a stroll through Idealware's Consultants listing in the appendix.

The CMS Websites

2009-03-30T02:40:00.000-07:00

Tonight I was trolling around in CMS Matrix to see what interesting tidbits I could pick up. What I came across that piqued my interest was their list of links. Omitting the generalist Wikipedia, there are six featured references.

I took the time to visit each site and search for "Plone" to get an idea of the currency and thoroughness of their material. What I found was surprisingly uneven.

Resource	Plone Citations	Most Recent Plone Item
CMS Critic	5	03/16/09
CMS Watch™	88	10/26/07
CMS Info	38	12/22/08
CMS Review	12	03/17/09
CMS Report	82	03/25/09
CMS Wire	120	03/04/09

CMS Watch was very out of date despite the fairly large collection of citations. CMS Wire had the largest number of items but doesn't have a date sort feature, so it would have been easy to miss something more current than their reference to the multi-site management article earlier this month.

CMS Critic only had five URLs (and one of those was their complete CMS listing), but they were very recent. Interestingly, Plone doesn't make CMS Critic's list of enterprise content management, there isn't a Plone review, and there isn't an interview with any key players. Perhaps there's a marketing opportunity here.