The Great Backyard Plone Count 2010

I'm gearing up for this year's GBPC, The Great Backyard Plone Count in only 14 more days.  This year's event corresponds with The Great Backyard Bird Count, also taking place on the same long weekend, 12-15 February, 2010.



Last year, our first ever, we took in 184 sightings of Plone sites. Thanks to every one who participated especially to Matt Hamilton (30 sites) and D. Thomas (27 sites), who were our top contributors.  If you contributed last year, we'll set up a simple mechanism for you to simply confirm that they are still active sites without having to re-enter any data. 

One important change this year is the addition of a usability question, inspired by Jukka Ojaniemi's Plone research.  It's just a quick 1-3 scale (awful to alright to awesome), but it will help define the span of Plone quality.

Some of the tools we'll set up will include Google Docs mechanisms to: 

• Use the 2010 Data Form  (active only 12-15 Feb.)

• Download the Plone Checklist (download an empty table, fill in all your sites at once)

• Submit Your Plone Checklist (upload a bulk list to an e-mail address--active only 12-15 Feb.) 

• Confirm last year's sites (via e-mail notification--active only 12-15 Feb--you may still add new site sightings)

• Explore the 2009 Results

Considering that Plone.net lists 1950 sites, being able to track about 10% of that number, especially intranets that are otherwise invisible behind firewalls is very helpful to those of us who watch the numbers.

Plone and Disaster Relief

Watching the Hope for Haiti Now telethon, I'm reminded that one reason my shop uses Plone harkens back to the Sumatran earthquake and tsunami back in Dec. 2004.  We were babes in arms, futzing around with various home-built Python and Zope concoctions for interactive websites.  Plone 2.0.1 had come up on my radar as a promising alternative to home cooking our portals. 

Meanwhile, Oxfam America had just retooled their website using Plone with the help of Enfold Systems.  December 26 the disaster in Sumatra struck.  In a single month the new Oxfam America site processed something on the order of $14 million in charitable donations, an amazing amount.  Obviously Plone could handle the scalability problem.  (See how they did it.)  Oxfam America continues its next-generation site with the help of Jazcarta.

With that vote of confidence, we forged ahead, building numerous small to medium portals, upgrading to 2.5, and basically getting steadily smarter about the whole Python-Zope-Plone stack.  Just yesterday we retired our first portal, Sandia's Training Course on Cooperative Monitoring, due to budget reductions.  However, our second, a water monitoring and hydrogeological modeling site, continues to this day. 

Now, with the Haitian earthquake crisis, I'm reminded that catastrophes continue to plague the world and Plone continues to play a role.  Go to Oxfam America and give whatever you are able to.  If you can, give a monthly gift to help sustain their continuing efforts worldwide. 

CMS PageRanks

Alexander Limi pointed out in a tweet back in late December that Plone.org was one of only 148 websites with a Google pagerank of 9 or higher.  Interestingly, only WordPress and Mambo of other CMS make it onto the list.

That said, some pseudo-pagerank estimators include Joomla and Drupal in the pagerank 9 levels.  At the same time, sites such as Alfresco.com and Interwoven.com have only a PR of 7, while Vignette.com (OpenText) has an 8.  Fatwire.com drags in with a 6. 

Oracle and some other big names turn up, but probably due to their mainline software, not necessarily their CMS.  Microsoft.com has a PR of  9 but their SharePoint site only pulls in a 7.  Oracle's WebCenter Suite scores a 6. 

Like Amazon sales ranks, the data is dynamic along several axes:  when and which Google data center is being queried.  iWebTools shows 33 different data centers where for Drupal.org most list a PR of 0 at the moment even while Plone.org rocks on with a 9. This may be a measure of a CMS's search engine optimization more than anything else, in which case Plone is one of the leaders. 
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In closing I'd like to mention that one of my favorite Plone sites, the Great Backyard Bird Count, shows this year's event scheduled for February 12-15, 2010.  Get your binoculars out!

And that means that the Great Backyard Plone Count is on for that same 96-hour period.  Stand by for details, including instructions on CMS spotting.  Tip o' the hat to Seth Gottlieb at content here for publicizing last year's event.

A New Look--A New Year

After fussing around with my blogger template for altogether too long, I've moved on to a new template.  Hopefully, this one is pleasing to the eye and easy to read.

I've taken this opportunity to start off the new year with my quarterly Amazon sales rank statistics.  As is often the case, the values are bouncing around quite a bit.  New titles like Rose's Plone 3 for Education and Williams' Plone 3 Theming are doing well.  Aspeli's Professional Plone Development is still holding its own.  Plone Live (Pelletier & Shariff) is at the top of the graph, but that's an artifact of their online sales that bypass Amazon.  In fact, many Plone titles are published and sold by Packt directly, which probably dilutes their sales ranks. 

Plone Metrics Person of the Year Award

It's that time of year again, time to single out someone who I personally believe did an outstanding job of participating in the Plone community, contributed significantly to the promotion of Plone, and is a heckuva human being.  This year has been singularly tough for me, in large part due to my inability to attend the Budapest convention.  It's at World Plone that I often get my inspiration for an award that manifestly is unilaterally decided and, for a blog that prides itself on getting the numbers right, totally based on my own qualitative perceptions and myoptic view of the Plone world.

All that said, there are a ton of worthy folks out there.  Here are just a few of the contenders that have crossed my mind in a hectic week of holiday cheer, out-of-town visitors, and post-cold virus sniffles. 

• David Glick, Rob Porter, and Mikko Ohtamaa were the top 3 in the Plone IRC Superstar Contest.  Hats off to them and all the others on IRC who make it happen day in and day out.  Along with the core developers, book authors, and the documentation team, you are the engine that keeps Plone moving forward. 
• And speaking of Plone development, the release managers for 3.x (Wichert Akkerman) and 4 (Eric Steele) have my undying admiration. 
  
• Another worthy group is the Foundation Board (another tip o' the hat to all Board members, past and present).  Jon Stahl (2008-9 Prez) and Gier Baekholt (this year's Esteemed Leader) should be particularly touted.    
  
• A fourth group that I looked at were the evangelists, the Plone marketing folks.  Mark Corum holds the marketing chair on the Board, but he is surrounded by others who spread the word:  Nate Aune, Matt Hamilton, Dylan Jay, and Roberto Allende all are high-volume participants on the Evangelism forum over on Nabble.  Roberto as one of the key champions of World Plone Day deserves special mention and Matt did an especially excellent job as Program Chair for this year's conference..
  

There was a strong urge to follow Time Magazine 2006 down the path of "You" as the person of the year.  And it's very true that the community as a whole and the entire Plone ecosystem has much to be proud of.  That said, I'll stick with my tradition, such as it is, and choose an individual.  (Drum roll, please.)

Today Nate Aune is named as Plone Metric's Person of the Year.  His participation at events of all sizes and kinds, plus his consistent and notable contributions to the Evangelism Forum have had a strong positive effect on the Plone community and our perception in the CMS world.  As before, this award comes with no monetary compensation and only the promise of a free beer whenever Nate and I are in the same town. 

Happy New Year!

Plone Metrics 2009 Recap

Last year was an eventful one for Plone.  Thankfully, it was less so for me, with my parents doing well after a disastrous Dec. 2008.  However, last week's cold set me back in terms of my December postings.  With my sniffles pretty much gone, its now time to get back to wrapping up the year at Plone Metrics.

2009 had 50 postings--I almost kept up with my weekly schedule.  Readership was much higher overall and spiked several times.  There were 58 comments, thank you very much.  Unfortunately, the site was the victim of a spate of non-sensical comments that merely attempted to insert links to other CMS products.  As a result I've had to enable comment moderation on the blog.  My apologies for having to slow down the pace of interaction.   

Well, let's sift through the monthly summaries and see what's gone under the bridge in 2009.

January.  Discussions about CMS Matrix data, CMS blog postings, and usability for seniors were featured last January and received some excellent comments. 

February. The Great Backyard Plone Count was in February and we gleaned some interesting data.  I'll continue this the month after next for our third year of data collection.  Meanwhile, a piece on usability of CMS home sites was widely read. 

March.  Themes turned to the quarterly review of Amazon sales rank stats, a look at the CMS Watch annual subway map, and the roll-out of the new Plone.org. 

April.  With spring came the 2nd Annual World Plone Day and the Idealware CMS Report.  There followed a heated discussion over at Four Kitchens about Drupal vs Plone security vulnerabilities.  This was an area where Idealware ranked Plone as outstanding but Drupal only as solid. 

May.  The "Blank Spots" series wrapped up in May after looking at Plone.org visitor demographics, temporal rhythms, and visitor loyalty.

June.  We got our first look at LaunchPad download stats.  BTW, as of today the Plone 3.3 series has had over 110,000 downloads while 3.2 has had over 1,000,000. 

July.  Plone Twitter stats, Amazon sales ranks, and a look back at Paul Graham's 2001 software popularity essay.   

August.  A posting following up on the New York Times article on SharePoint and a discussion about "black swan" events rounded out the month. 

September.  A posting entitled "The Plone-SharePoint Chronicles" garnered wide readership and continues to collect search hits to this day. 

October.  This month turned up an anomaly that reminds us statisticians that we really have to understand the underlying data.  A simple post mentioning the Packt CMS Awards that pointed out their nominations per category led to an enormous spike in readership.  Almost certainly this was due to some cross-posting about the Packt Awards, not the eloquence of my deep vision about open source community awards. Of course, the month ended with the World Plone Conference in Budapest, which I was unable to attend . 


November.  More proselytizing about Plone when it took the Packt Award for Other Open Source.  An essay about decision-making, paradoxes of choice, information cascades, and snap decisions also rounded out the month. 

December. The CMS Watch Subway Map was released and I had some fun reworking the routes to produce a more Plone-centric view.  Version 4 Alpha 3 has just released.  Now all that remains is to figure out who will be Plone Metrics Person of the Year.  The tension is palpable...

A Plone-Centric View of CMS Technology

Some clever person over in the Plone Evangelism Forum (Armin Stross-Radschinski) suggested that the community look at a Plone-centric subway map.  From that germ of an idea comes this modification of the CMS Watch Subway Map: 

This leaves a nasty jog in the Blue line where Alfresco to Typo3 now connects with the Plone station.  If I had the time and patience, I'd flip the Blue line over to the other side of the Red line and continue it in the same direction as the Alfresco-Plone leg, although that would crowd into the CMS Watch logo in the center. 

I'll leave it to CMS Watch to see if they agree with the repositioning shown above.  It echos the remarks made by Limi in this year's Future of Plone address at World Plone 2009 -- we're not competing with the Drupals and Joomlas of the world. 

To move Plone onto the main line, we'd have to add one or both of Enterprise Content Management or Digital Asset Management.  If you think about it, were Plone classified as a strong Digital Asset Management system, it would probably also meet the criteria for ECM.  It all goes back to the discussion about what constitutes an ECM.  I'm not sure that Wikipedia has the last word on that, at least at the moment.  The article there is listed as having multiple issues. 

Meanwhile, after some reflection, it occurred to me to extract the Red-Blue-Green lines and look at the neighborhood around Plone in a less cluttered view.  That led me to a Venn diagram instead of a subway map: 

This omits all the other CMS Watch categories and leaves a very clear Plone-centric picture.  Plone is running with the big dogs and its the only open source solution in the center.
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In closing, we're fast coming up on the New Year and that can only mean one thing:  Plone Metrics' Person of the Year Award.  No cash, no prizes, but as they say on Iron Chef, they'll have "the peoples' ovation and fame forever."  Now accepting suggestions until Dec. 28.

Happy Plone Holidays!