For the Gang in Bristol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.