LinkedIn Questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.