Plone Indicators

Last March Jeff Whatcott put together an insightful set of graphics for Drupal. Some of these stats have been watched on this blog, but there are some new ones. Someone over at the Plone boards on Nabble suggested that the Plone community do the same. Here goes...

How Often Do People Search for Plone on Google?
Plone = blue, Drupal = red, Wordpress = green, Joomla = orange



Back in 2003, Plone was the leader of the (very small) CMS pack. Search volume has been declining since mid-2005. 2006 was a good year for Plone in the news.

How Often Do People Mention Plone on Twitter?
There have been no tweets recently. (Curious, because I saw conference tweets in DC.)

How Often Do People Mention Plone on Blogs?
Posts that contain Plone per day for the last 30 days.


How Many Job Postings Mention Plone?

Very periodic, but also trending upwards nicely.

plone Job Trends

plone jobs

However, when compared with other heavy-hitter CMS...

plone, drupal, joomla, wordpress Job Trends

plone jobs - drupal jobs - joomla jobs - wordpress jobs

How Do Plone Jobs Pay?
(Gotta figure out what Blogger is doing to my table styles!)

Python Developer	$88,000
Product Developer	$72,000
Web Developer Net	$69,000
QA Test Analyst	$74,000
Computer Programmer	$54,000
Application Development Manager	$104,000
Senior Information Architect	$86,000
Linux Engineer	$88,000

plone $74,000
drupal $71,000
wordpress $61,000
joomla $71,000

View Larger Salary Graph

How Well Do Plone Books Sell on Amazon?
Please see my earlier post.

The Quest for the Holy Grail

I continue to work with Plone during the day and think about metrics at night. Alas, tonight I've got to get an early posting in--video-conference with Amman tomorrow morning at 5:00 AM. Yep, with 9 timezones difference, any f2f communications require getting our shiny white fundaments out of bed by 5 in the morning or staying up until at least midnight. Especially during Ramadan, work schedules in the Middle East are shortened--no breakfast, no lunch, no tea breaks. Basically, you're done with your 8 hrs by 3:00 and plenty tired for low blood sugar.

Today I took Hovie Hawk's advice (hovie.com) and jinned up an alternative WACSI page with graphics in a grid instead of pages of text. I also found the problem with 2.1's RSS script. Easy fix. Now the Google Reader is happy as a clam with our site's feeds. The slides for the two days of NGO training in Jordan are coming together. Just need a few more screen captures of user/group administration, customization, and Plone use of CSS to finish off the set. 50 slides = 6 hours with plenty of hands-on exercises.

Plone Advocacy

By now you may have noticed that this blog has a teeny, tiny bit of Plone advocacy in it. However, just as in my presentation to InterLab last week, the bottom line is to make sure you match requirements with systems. That includes feature comparisons to see that tools can deliver needed objectives, assessments to see that staff and consultants can use software systems, and a cold, hard objective review of your ICT environment.

There is no magic online feature matrix, no silver-bullet white paper, no error-free consultancy, no unambiguous, simple answer. A few blogs have attempted to approach the problem (for example, see Benamer and Burton's discussion), but there appears to be no general consensus.

For now I'll heft a toast to the lucky ones in Naples at the World Plone Conference and sit tight until the videos come online in a few weeks. And I think my strategy of measuring progress towards a successful Plone end-state (a widely adopted, stable yet evolving system) is more worthwhile than many other approaches, especially in that it encourages transparency and points towards similar efforts for other software systems.

Download History

Here's the latest compilation of download stats from SourceForge since the dawn of time. The all-time high in Oct. 2006 was just after the 2.1.4 rollout in Sept. 2006.

Other peaks coincide with releases: Mar. 2005 is four months after 2.0.5 and Apr. 2004 was probably due to 2.0.

The most recent peaks align with the version 2.5.2 activity early last year. As with vulnerability data, 3.0 hasn't been out long enough to make a significant appearance. Look for a spike after Naples and towards the end of the year as 3.0 usage picks up.

Some Trends

I've started filling in the matrix of effectiveness discussed two weeks ago. One of the most telling items is the MITRE CVE list of vulnerabilities. They list 3 vulnerabilities that are relevant to Plone version 2.5, all of them of medium severity. (3.0.1 is too recent to have any meaningful data--they list no vulnerabilities.) By comparison Drupal has 73(!), SharePoint has 12 (5 of them of high severity), and Mambo has 122(!).

Additionally, I plotted the dates of the significant releases to come up with this graphic. It shows a remarkably steady trend of evenly spaced releases. The ticks on the x-axis are approx. 6 months apart. Tip o' the hat to all the developers who make this happen.



Of course, the big upward jumps are major releases and I've been so presumptuous as to put in a trendline. If 3.5 comes out next July, it will be well ahead of the regression model.

Content Management at the Dept of Energy

I recently attended the DOE Internet Workshop at Los Alamos National Laboratory (InterLab). To my surprise, there still isn't a consensus on an enterprise-wide CMS. Islands of Drupal, WordPress, and others are out there. Some labs use home-built CMS, others Oracle, and still others SharePoint, which probably has the widest installation base. Problem is that SharePoint is tricky to use as an extranet and really doesn't work and play well with non-IE browsers. And don't even get me talking about custom workflows...

My "Plone at Sandia" presentation was well received and may have made a few take another look. Probably also got a number of folks to take a second look at Python. After all, what does Google (a Python shop) know that we don't?

Nov. 1 I'm off to Amman for a WACSI workshop (wacsi.unm.edu) where I'll be training representatives from Middle East NGOs on Plone. We're expecting Jordanian, Syrian, Saudi, and Egyptian participants. Should be an excellent event.

Here are some interesting tidbits and links:

• Nucleus Research 2003 whitepaper "ROI Comparison Report: Portals"
• "Recommendations for Benchmarking Web Site Usage among Academic Libraries" by Christy Hightower, Julie Sih, and Adam Tilghman (1998 but still interesting)
• "Content Management Problems and Open Source Solutions" by Seth Gottlieb (2005)
  
• "Defining Open Source Software Project Success" by Kevin Crowston, Hala Annabi, and James Howison (2003)

Also, here is the link to an Excel version of my matrix of effectiveness measures.

I'll be looking for more up-to-date material in the days and weeks ahead, but its clear that people have been mulling over the problem since the late 90s. I'd like to hear from those attending the Naples Convention on what they learn about the issue.

A few good URLs

A recent review of CMS (CMS Watch) showed Plone doing well in a wide variety of categories: standards, access control, i18N, aggregation, repository services, user-generated content, micro-applications, active user groups, and good value.

Another place to watch is the CMS Matrix, which is an online feature comparison tool. Of course, feature comparisons do not in and of themselves make a winning product--matching requirements with features and your IT capabilities is the ticket.

More Measures of Effectiveness

Here's the rest of the Plone Effectiveness Measurement table, starting with attributes and drilling down to measures, including a column of notes about where we might be able to gather the necessary inputs.

Attribute	Measure	Notes
Release Size	Major, minor, RC, beta, alpha	Sourceforge history
Release Frequency	Date
Bugs	Subsequent bug reports	See FLOSS Study of Available Tools
Core mailing lists	Activity per unit time
Support mailing lists	Activity per unit time
Security vulnerabilities	Number of known vulnerabilities	MITRE CVE list of known vulnerabilities
Size of CDT	Number of core developers
Involvement of CDT	Length of service; role	Questionnaire
New features	Major and minor features included per release	http://plone.org/products/plone/roadmap
Downloads	Downloads per platform	http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=47214&ugn=plone
Installations	Number of installations	?
Defectors	Number of installations removed	Uninstall feedback to Plone.org
Economic health of third-party companies	Metrics from Plone Foundation, Enfold, One/NW, etc.	Direct requests?
Technical reviews	Number and 'rating' from published reviews	Data mining?
High-profile installations	Number and 'quality' of high-profile users	http://plone.org/about/sites
Users of Plone portals	Number of registered members of Plone portals	Sampling?
Visitors to Plone portals	Number of visitors to Plone portals	Sampling?

Tomorrow I'll post a listing of URLs for various reviews and comparisons of Plone and other CMS.

Plone Metrics Goes Online

OK, so I couldn't talk management into Naples. That means I'll miss this year's World Plone Conference. And its an important one: Plone 3.0 is the current stable release and I need to spin up on all the new capabilities.

Best I can do for the Plone community is add my voice from afar. I've been corresponding intermittantly with Paul Everitt, this year's chair of the Plone Foundation, about metrics for Plone. One idea that's gotten a little traction is a method by Richard Bullocks from, of all things, the Air War College. He starts with a desired end-state and drills down to objectives, their values, and measurable attributes. See his dissertation for the full 188-page blow-by-blow description.

For Plone, I've come up with the following.

Plone End-State	Objective	Value	Attribute
	Stable yet evolving	Software Releases	Release Size
			Release Frequency
		Software Quality	Bugs
			Core mailing lists
			Support mailing lists
			Security vulnerabilities
		Core Development Team	Size of CDT
			Involvement of CDT
		Features	New features
	Widely adopted	Acceptance	Downloads
			Installations
			Defectors
			Economic health of third-party companies
			Technical reviews
		Visibility	High-profile installations
			Users of Plone portals
			Visitors to Plone portals

In a future posting, I'll add measures, sources of these metrics, and examine some of the ways we might obtain a valid and useful measure of Plone progress towards a successful end-state. Please comment freely on what you see as strengths and weaknesses of my methodology, not to mention on Plone itself.