The Great Backyard Plone Count Redux

Back in 2015 when I last wrote an entry in this blog, Plone 5 had just rolled out.  Retired from Sandia National Laboratories, I wound down my IT work and dusted off my old ecology degrees.  I started volunteering at our local BioPark Botanic Garden.  I thought I had escaped, but the lure of legacy software systems pulled me back into part-time consulting.  

This past weekend our venerable Plone 5 server with its bespoke Multi-Conference System was finally retired.  It's been replace by an up-to-date Plone 6 virtual server that provides EasyForm delivery.  With that (plus it's a raw, windy day outside), I'm inspired to take a look at how Plone in general is holding up.  

First off, Plone is doing better than cmsmatrix.org, my standby for CMS comparison.  They've gone by the wayside.  For 7 years I had turned to CMS Matrix for statistics, especially on the weekend of the Great Backyard Bird Count.  I would take inspiration from Cornell Labs yearly bird count to make an annual census of Plone sites.  

Now, after an 11-year pause, I'm looking at the stats again.  Fortunately, other more modern tools have popped up to replace CMS Matrix.  Builtwith immediately jumps to the forefront with informative graphics and easy to understand tabular summaries.  

The above graph shows the past 22 years of Plone usage as they have determined it.  The top line comes in at 7271 sites as of January 31st of this year.  This is lower than the golden age of Plone, 2012-2019, but still respectful.  Also, last year's release of Plone 6 definitely reversed a slow downward trend.  

I'm looking forward to how this continues into 2026.  With anti-US feelings becoming manifest across much of the world, there's talk of divesting IT systems of US-centric products and moving to open source solutions.  I sense an opportunity to plug those holes with Plone.  

Plone Metrics' 2015 Person of the Year

This year the clear winner in meaningful Plone stats for 2015 is Plone 5.0.  Here's the graph of session visits to Plone.org for the first 30 weeks of 2015:

There's a slow but steady downward trend that comes along with being a stable, mature release of a mainstream product.  There are minor peaks in late February and for the 4.3.5 and 4.3.6 releases in May-June. 

Now here's the graph of session visits since the release of Plone 5.0 in weeks after 30: 

Week 38 corresponds to Sept. 29, the release date of Plone 5.0.  Needless-to-say, there was over a 20% uptick in visitation to the site, no doubt as people checked out the new release and upgraded their 4.3 sites.  Most notable has been the fact that the trendline is flat, meaning that there is a steady, healthy interest in Plone that has continued for months after the initial excitement of the 5.0 release itself. 

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

2007	Alexander Limi
2008	Joel Burton
2009	Nate Aune
2010	Eric Steele
2011	Toby Roberts
2012	Martijn Pieters
2013	Elizabeth Leddy
2014	The Year 2020
2015	?

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

• The core developers and release managers definitely need a huge round of applause for all the essential work they do.  Considering how successful Plone 5 has been, Eric Steele probably would be Person of the Year except for my informal "can't win it twice" rule. 
• The 2015 Plone Conference team and sponsors for Bucharest. Also, a hat tip goes out to all the other event teams and participants.  You are the beating pulse of the community. 
• All of those who have blogged, chatted on the support channels, and microblogged about Plone are another group of supporters who contribute simply by continuing to communicate your ideas, thoughts, and solutions along with the occasional pieces of humor.  
• As always, the Foundation Board and the gets a great big nod of appreciation here. 

Along those lines I should point out that Plone still ranks highly at CMS Matrix.  Plone remains in the top 10 whether sorting the huge CMS Matrix list by clicks, views or compares. We've only slipped one rank in views since last year. 

Clicks	10th
Views	8th
Compares	7th

But back to the question at hand, who is Plone Metrics' Person of the Year?  With so many awesome contributors, this has been a tricky one, but I'm going with that long-time herder of cats, Paul Roeland.  With some many things going on in so many directions for Plone, with subgroups and special interests constantly making demands of his time, and as a Board member since 2011 not to mention 4-term President, it seems appropriate to name Paul the Plone Metrics' Person of the Year.  

The 7th Annual Great Backyard Plone Count

It's that time of year... the Great Backyard Bird Count, organized by the Audubon Society, the Cornell Institute of Ornithology, and Bird Studies Canada.  And that means that it's also time for the Great Backyard Plone Count, this weekend Friday through Monday.

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.  If your input from February 2013-14 is still current, you're already done. 

That said, the input form on the Google Docs spreadsheet is open.  Anyone can submit sightings of Plone in the wild.  The form will stay open until midnight Monday 16 February.  If you have bulk data and the form is awkard to use, kindly contact me and we'll do some behind-the-scenes sharing or cutting-and-pasting.  I'll be doing some mining of Delicious and other social bookmarking services this month and posting them as well. 

Although there's significant bias in a survey like this, the real value comes from tracking trends over time.  This is the seventh annual Backyard Plone Count (since 2009) and as the number of yearly data points increase, we'll better be able to extrapolate from the observations.  It's not that we're getting an absolute count of Plone market penetrations (just like the GBBC isn't counting individual birds), it's just that we're getting a repeatable sampling by the community.  It is as much a measure of community involvement as it is a metric of the actual number of Plone sites out there.

So get out there and spot some Plone sites -- and while you're at it, spend a little time counting birds at your feeder.

Thanks in advance!

The Plone Metrics' Number of the Year

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

'Tis the Season

Yes, it's that time of the year when everyone has misplaced apostrophes everywhere -- T'is the Season.  Just remember, "Axial tilt is the reason for the season," at least when you're an astronomer's son.  

Not only is it ChrisKwanFestNukkStice, it's just a week away from New Year's Eve.  That can mean only one thing:  Plone Metrics Person of the Year and chasing away the wolf that ate the sun (thx to @LeVostrCG).  I'm now accepting suggestions for a metric that can be used to differentiate one member of the Plone community from all the rest of this amazing group of people who keep the wheels of Plone spinning.

By way of a recap, here's past years' winners. 

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

Whether I've used personal experience, quality of contribution, OhLol measures, or something else, it's always been a difficult decision.  Too many good people doing great things.  If you have an idea for this year's metric, pop me a line @schlepp on Twitter.

Cheers!

Programming Languages and CMSs

Courtesy  of a link on LifeHacker, I discovered an interactive IEEE webpage that lets you slice and dice programming languages in a variety of ways.  You can sort them by ranking criteria like "trending," "jobs," "open," or customize your own ranking systems.  Additionally, you can filter them by web, mobile, enterprise or embedded language types. 

Interestingly, Python holds its number 4 spot overall and for all individual language types.  PHP follows in the number 6 slot.  PERL struggles along at 8 or lower, depending on how you select the filter settings. 

That said, it looks like Python is very much a contender in the programming language debate.  I used to teach Python to my class in algorithms because the class text, Corman and Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein's "Introduction to Algorithms," uses Python-ish pseudocode.  In fact, we'd often cut and paste their pseudocode, make a few edits, and run the algorithms with time tracking functions.  Racing algorithms--how to make O-notation fun. 

That, of course, brings us back to CMS.  A search on CMS Matrix for Python-based systems returns 23 results:

• autowebcms
• BlackMonk CMS
• CubicWeb
• Cyn.in
• django-cms
• DXM Multilingual
• Easy Publisher
• eContent 3.5
• Ellington
• EZRO
• Macromedia Contribute
• Mezzanine
• Nuxeo CPS
• Plone
• PublishXML
• PyLucid
• Silva
• Solgema
• SR2
• Web Cube
• WEB123 CMS
• WebEngine v6
• zwook

A search for PHP-based systems returns 585.  (Contact the author if you'd like to see the entire listing.)

That's a fascinating mismatch between the IEEE ranking of the programming language and number of CMSs based on the underlying language.  Considering that Plone and Django are the heavy hitters among the Python-based CMSs, this puts them in a positive light. 

The 6ht Annual Great Backyard Plone Count

It's that time of year... the Great Backyard Bird Count, organized by the Audubon Society, the Cornell Institute of Ornithology, and Bird Studies Canada.  And that means that it's also time for the Great Backyard Plone Count, this weekend Friday through Monday.

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.  If your input from February 2013 is still current, you're already done. 

That said, the input form on the Google Docs spreadsheet is open.  Anyone can submit sightings of Plone in the wild.  The form will stay open until midnight Monday 17 February.  I'll be doing some mining of Delicious and other social bookmarking services this month and posting them as well. 

Although there's significant bias in a survey like this, the real value comes from tracking trends over time.  This is the sixth annual Backyard Plone Count (since 2009) and as the number of yearly data points increase, we'll better be able to extrapolate from the observations.  It's not that we're getting an absolute count of Plone market penetrations (just like the GBBC isn't counting individual birds), it's just that we're getting a repeatable sampling by the community.  It is as much a measure of community involvement as it is a metric of the actual number of Plone sites out there.

So get out there and spot some Plone sites -- and while you're at it, spend a little time counting birds at your feeder.

Thanks in advance!