CMS and Blogs

CMS Wire had a short bit about what technologies are popular amongst the top 100 blogs on Technorati. Not unexpectedly, WordPress ran away with that. One could argue (I would) that blogging tools are not full fledged CMS. Shouldn't be surprised that blogs are mostly run by blogging software.

Of note though, was this comment on more general tools:

Wider scope Web CMS technologies are not used much by the top blogs. Drupal scores 5 sites, with Plone used by 1. Other popular Web CMS platforms are conspicuous only by their absence.

Based on a tiny sample of only 100 blogs, ordinal rank might be more interesting than the raw number of sites run by a particular framework. In this case Blogger (powering this blog, for example) was 8th, Drupal 9th, and Plone 10th. (BTW, uThink was the Plone site that made it into Technorati's top 100 list, although one can't tell just by looking at the uThink source.)

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To continue with my occasional data mining of Technorati, here's the blog stats on a few top-flight CMS.

CMS	Posts	Blogs	Posts/Blog
SharePoint	35,015	1,290	27
Joomla!	39,018	1,475	26
Plone	2,339	105	22
DotNet Nuke	2,021	114	18
Drupal	29,806	2,192	14

Interestingly, Plone's posts/blog value has dropped from a runaway high of over 50 last April to a middle-of-the-road 22. All the CMSs are now within a couple percentage points of one another.

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Quite unrelated to blog stats, another item to mention in passing is that World Plone Day has been nailed down and formally announced on Plone.org. Wednesday 22 April is the date for the 2009 event. Be there... worldwide.

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Also unrelated to blog stats is of note here in the United States. President-Elect Obama has called for a national day of service and volunteer contribution tomorrow, January 19. One easy way to help is to give some time to your favorite open source project. Open source software is one of the most egalitarian efforts on the planet and everyone, everywhere can participate. Watch Darcy Hanning's Top Ten Ways to Get Involved with the Plone Community for ideas even (and especially) for the non-developer.

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Finally, to close out this week's posting, I'd like to put in a plug for a concept I'll try to get off the ground next month: the Great Backyard Plone Count. It is a shameless knockoff of the Audubon Society's Great Backyard Bird Count and has largely the same goal: collect Plone site statistics from citizen observers. The concept note is over in the Plone Marketing section of Open Plans. An initial draft of the data collection spreadsheet is over at Google Docs, as is a draft one slide presentation/poster. Please feel free to provide feedback and critical thought.

And don't forget to check out the real Great Backyard Bird Count-- its powered by Plone.

CMS Blogs Stats

I was watching Darci Hanning's "Top Ten Ways to Get Involved with the Plone Community" and was pleased that first out of the box was "Blog about Plone." So I thought I'd look at some stats on CMS and blogs.

Technorati has Plone posts averaging a little under 20 per day for the last month with a total of 6866 posts in 134 blogs. By way of comparison, Drupal is listed with 12,853 posts in 2269 blogs. Joomla has 10,742 posts in 1389 blogs. SharePoint: 11,305 in 1451. Alfresco: 447 in 58. Openedit: 11 in 1. DotNet Nuke: 8 in 5.

What is one to make of this? Of course, first, its all just numbers. There could just as easily by 6800 outstanding posts for Plone and 12,000 dirges for Drupal or the other way around. But clearly the buzz is, whether good or bad, is more about Drupal than anyone else.

However, there appears to be more than just the usual continuum in these numbers. We've got four CMS that each are in the many thousands of blogs and three that are only in double digits or less.

Even so, there's yet another way to look at things: posts per blog. Take a look at this summary table sorted in descending order by posts/blog.

CMS	Posts	Blogs		Posts/blog
Plone	6866	134		51.2
Openedit	11	1		11.0
SharePoint	11305	1451		7.8
Joomla	10742	1389		7.7
Alfesco	447	58		7.7
Drupal	12853	2269		5.7
DotNet Nuke	8	5		1.6

Wow! Plone blows everything on the chart away, even the newcomer and statistical outlier Openedit barely makes it above 10 posts/blog. Darci is on to something here--Plone bloggers may not be as numerous as SharePoint's or Drupal's, but they are either very active or have been at it for a long time. (Case in point, Plone Metrics has had 70 posts since last October.)

BTW, with all this poking about in blogs, I did turn up some interesting reading. Limi's latest on simplifying Plone and the editing experience is a good place to start. Don't miss Christian Schlotz's posting on Data Portability.

I also stumbled upon an NGO on "Ask Metafilter" asking for a comparison of Plone and Drupal. Of the 15 comments, most were adamantly anti-Plone, but seemed to be ill-informed, based on incomplete or obsolete knowledge. I'll have to register at Metafilter ($5, bummer) and then post an up-to-date Plone advocacy comment over there.