Joomla
Staking our future on PHP
I believe that the growth of PHP depends increasingly on applications like Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, phpBB, Typo3, ezPublish and similar systems. Specifically, I believe that most organizations adopt PHP primarily because they want to use one of these popular applications which have PHP at their core. Fewer organizations adopt PHP because they want to build from scratch their own PHP applications. Hence, more than ever, the future of PHP depends on popular PHP applications that have emerged over recent years.
Conversely, the future of Drupal depends on PHP. Moreover, many of us are staking our future, and that of our businesses, on Drupal and, by extension, on PHP. The same is true for those who make their living with Joomla!, WordPress, phpBB, vBulletin, Typo3, and ezPublish.
It seems that we have arrived at a point in which there is a symbiotic relationship between PHP and the most popular PHP applications. A relationship that did not exist when PHP was created. Symbiotic relationships are obligatory: we depend entirely on each other for survival. And yet, I feel like we've been living apart. It makes sense for us (i.e, application developers) to contribute to the development of PHP, and for the PHP core developers to work more closely with the developers of the most popular PHP applications.
Having spent ten years of my life developing Java Virtual Machines and run-time systems, I feel that I'd be able to contribute to PHP. Unfortunately, I don't currently have time for it. Maybe when Acquia is a bit larger, we'll hire a full-time engineer to contribute to PHP's development. Maybe other organizations will consider doing the same, or more people will find the time to be active in more than just one project. It seems as though our future would really benefit from such people.
If you could contribute to PHP core, what would you change?
The commercialization of a volunteer-driven Open Source project
In the Open Source software community, there is a considerable nervousness regarding paying people to work on volunteer-driven projects. For example, Joomla recently hired some developers to work on their core software, a decision that has caused much debate in their community. At Drupal, we recently hired a temporary staff to help with the Drupal.org redesign. There is an understandable concern that the spirit of volunteerism will be lost or a volunteer project will be tainted when a paid staff is introduced. There are worries that a project's agenda will change to suit the needs of 'privateers'. However, many projects that rely completely on volunteers fall short of what can be done by a paid staff. Some projects can't afford not to make use of the benefits that a full-time, focused staff can provide.
The concept of major projects growing out of a volunteer, community-based model is not new to the world. Throughout history there are examples of pure volunteer organizations that were instrumental in the founding and formation of many projects. The first trade routes were ancient trackways which citizens later developed on their own into roads suited for wheeled vehicles in order to improve commerce. Transportation was improved for all citizens, driven by the commercial interest of some. Today, we certainly appreciate that our governments maintain the roads. However, we still see road signs stating that a particular section of a highway is kept clean and trim by volunteers -- at least in some countries. When new ground needs to be broken, it's often volunteer communities that do it. But a full-time, paid infrastructure can be necessary for the preservation and protection of what communities begin. And when new advances are to be made or gaps to be filled in, volunteers rise up within the paid infrastructure. There will always be a place for volunteers, just as there is a place for professionals.
It's quite common in the software industry that great movements are started by volunteers. While this can work quite well initially, there comes a time when a volunteer-based project becomes a threat to larger, controlled organizations (e.g., MySQL to Oracle, Linux to Microsoft). At that point, if the Open Source organization is to survive and compete, it may have to fortify its position by fostering commercial involvement that helps the project advance and compete. Red Hat is a good example. Without Red Hat, Linux might not have the strong market share it has today. It is also one of the reasons I co-founded Acquia, and why it is important that all Drupal companies contribute back to the project.
Within the Drupal project, we don't have a paid staff to advance the core software. However, many of the developers who contribute to critical parts of the Drupal code base make their living by building complex Drupal websites. Some Drupal developers are paid by customers to contribute their expertise to the Drupal project or are employed by companies 'sponsoring' Drupal development. Tens of thousands of developers are working with Drupal today, and many of them contribute back to the project. Albeit different, neither Joomla or Drupal are exclusively a volunteer run project, and that is one of the reasons we've grown so big. Ditto for WordPress that gets a lot of help from Automattic.
Volunteers rally together at times when they're needed and they play a critical role, particularly in the beginning. Without them, we would be nowhere in the Open Source software industry. Over time the maintenance and operation and in some cases the leadership are transferred to paid personnel. We have to accept into our projects those with commercial interests, without capitulating to rigid and narrow commercial interests. The commercialization of a volunteer-driven Open Source project is part of a project's natural life-cycle. While it can be a significant change, it is a great opportunity. We can reap the benefits of growth, prevent volunteer burn-out and distribute the effort.
Joomla vs Drupal: business models and commercial ecosystem
I just got back from CMSExpo in Chicago where I spent a few days surrounded by Joomla people. Although the CMSExpo conference started as a Joomla-only event, it has since opened up to other Open Source content management systems including Drupal, Wordpress, Plone and more. Due to its background, however, it's still heavy on Joomla, and as a result, I had the opportunity to meet a lot of influential people in the Joomla community, including a few Joomla co-founders and members of the Joomla leadership team. I'd like to share my observations, since they are relevant for all of us in the Drupal community.
In the Drupal community, today's business-model of choice seems to be providing implementation services for medium to large websites. The Joomla community, it seems, is very focused on the low-end of the market and most people make money by selling subscription services, usually either by selling commercial support for their GPL extensions or by selling access to template clubs (i.e., a collection of templates, bundled with some level of theming support). I talked to various template club owners and was surprised by the level of sophistication and adoption -- some template clubs employ more than thirty people and have answered hundreds of thousands of support questions.
But what does the future hold? The Drupal community seems to be expanding into the enterprise, whereas the Joomla community is expanding into, well ... Drupal. All the Joomla companies that I talked to at CMSExpo were in the process of taking their products and services to the Drupal market and rebranding their organizations to be cross-CMS compatible. Andy Miller, one of the co-founders of Joomla, and CEO of RocketTheme, one of the leading Joomla template clubs, has just launched a Drupal template club. Steve Burge, the founder of a training company called Open Source Training has added Drupal training to his portfolio (they delivered 100 Joomla training classes in 2009, and plan to deliver 200 training classes in 2010). The list goes on, and all this has been going on under the radar for most of us in the Drupal community -- under mine, at least.
Andy Miller, co-founder of Joomla!, and CEO of RocketTheme. RocketTheme has about 30 employees selling templates and template support to the Joomla! and Drupal community.
Why is this happening? First, the Joomla people that I talked to believed that there was more money to be made in the Drupal world, as Drupal tends to attract larger projects. Further, the lack of Drupal template clubs is perceived as an opportunity for Joomla developers already familiar with that business model. Third, since the long awaited Joomla 1.6 release is "only" an incremental release, some people are only marginally excited about it. Contrasted with Drupal 7 and Wordpress 3.0, both of which are shaping up to be phenomenal, paradigm-shifting releases with tons of improvements and feature additions, many Joomla developers are expanding their horizons and portfolios.
All in all, this isn't a bad thing. In fact it is incredibly exciting and incredibly scary at the same time. The Joomla community expanding to Drupal could help fortify Drupal in the low-end market, which is something I want us in the Drupal community to care about a lot more. At the same time, we'll have to educate a tsunami of new community members about our values and culture to make sure that they adopt the "Drupal Way" of doing things (i.e. our culture of collaboration, sharing, passion, openness, innovation and leadership). More than ever, we'll need Drupal mentors as interesting times are ahead.
Open Source CMS market share report 2009
The 2009 Open Source CMS market share report was released a couple of weeks ago. The report concludes that WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal maintain a large lead on the rest of the pack, and that they are the dominant players in the market.
Despite the rather lengthy nature of the survey, more than 600 persons completed the question set. The demographic data gathered shows the survey group to be primarily composed of senior IT professionals working in smaller organizations of 1 to 5 people. More than 80% of the participants had heard about Joomla!, Wordpress and Drupal, though most of them were more familiar with Wordpress and Joomla!.
© 2009 Open Source CMS market share report by Water & Stone and CMSWire.
Last year’s report found little to differentiate the three systems, at least in terms of market share. This year it appears that Joomla! gained a lot of market share relative to WordPress and Drupal. For example, the report shows that Joomla! has more books in print than Drupal or WordPress, and that Joomla! is used more than WordPress and Drupal -- at least by the participants in the survey. The results also show that Drupal has the highest abandonment rate of the three, that is, the rate at which systems are tried, then abandoned in favor of another system. The survey concludes that while the race is far from won, it does seem like Joomla! is starting to take the leadership position. On the flip side, the survey participants seems to be more positive about Wordpress and Drupal, than they are about Joomla!. All things combined, the data suggest we should be able to win over many users if we improve the Drupal experience.
© 2009 Open Source CMS market share report by Water & Stone and CMSWire.
All in all an interesting report that matches my perspective on the market. It is great to see Drupal come out strongly, but it also suggests that we have a lot of work to do. I'm very bullish about Drupal's future -- I think Drupal 7 can change the game for Drupal, especially combined with other successes like Whitehouse.gov using Drupal, Drupal being promoted to Gartner's 'visionaries' quadrant, as well as important initiatives as the Drupal.org redesign, Drupal Gardens, Buzzr and more. Exciting times!
Mollom launch coverage
It is now five days after Mollom came out of beta and some of the dust has settled, so I figured I'd give you an update on what people wrote. Here is a selected subset of some of the coverage we got:
- Peter Hagopian at InformationWeek: Mollom Comment Spam Solution Emerges From Beta. Mollom is currently supported by Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla, as well as the recent additions Radiant (a CMS built on the Ruby On Rails framework) and DaliCMS. Mollom seems to be getting better and better and it's nice to see it come out of beta.
- Mikkel Høgh: My six months with Mollom. Before Mollom, I’ve been using spam.module and Akismet with varying degrees of success, and when Mollom first came out, I wondered why we needed another Akismet, but decided to try it out to support Dries. The answer to that question is that Mollom is in fact not just another Akismet. Spam blocking is just one of the things it does. That does not mean that Mollom is not good at blocking spam. My experience is that Mollom is more effective than Akismet and spam.module combined.
- Growing Venture Solutions: Mollom - Out of Beta and Ready to Eat Your Spam (without bothering your normal visitors). The service is now out of Beta and available to large sites that need redundancy and volume analysis for 30 euros/month. That seems like a great deal and they've even got a better deal: most sites with limited needs who are willing to accept occasional server downtime can still get the service for free. Wonderful news.
- Jan Polzer at Maxiorel: Mollom: komentářový antispam a zkušenosti z praxe. (Czech article)
- Justin Miller at Code Sorcery: Mollom anti-spam service is out of beta. I've been using Mollom for a few months and have been very happy with it. If you run a blog, even one that isn't in Drupal, I would encourage you to check it out. It's free for many uses, so you lose nothing by at least giving it a shot.
- Josiah Ritchie: Mollom - The Bullet Proof Vest. All this means, the content on the site is pure, not diluted by the evils of this world. Pure, meaningful and trustworthy content means more activity from your visitors. If their experience in pleasant, not inhibited by spam checking devices or spent filtering spam themselves, they are much more likely to return.
- Robin Wauters at The Next Web: Mollom drops beta tag in quest to challenge Akismet. In the six months that the Belgium-based company has been beta-testing Mollom, they said to have blocked almost 9 million spam messages on thousands of sites.
- Glenn Paulley at Sybase: Fighting spam with Mollom. I’ve been using Mollom (as a beta customer) for several months for one of the websites that I manage and the effectiveness of Mollom’s techniques are impressive.
- Patrick Teglia: It's Best if You Don't See This. So, what makes Mollom different, from an end-user's point of view, than the other spam solutions I have tried (Akismet, Spam Karma, etc.)? Nothing, or rather, you have to do nothing, which is a whole lot less than what you do with the others. In fact, you don't have to deal with queues, moderation, constant attention and emails about all of the above. In other words you don't have to do anything. Oh, yeah, and the fact that it just plain works. I have yet to see a spam on my site.
- Robin Wauters at Tijd.be: Mollom niet langer in beta, krijgt er een betalend broertje bij. (Dutch article)
Thanks for the positive feedback, and I'm glad you like our service.
Google insights on Drupal
Recently, Google launched Google Insights. Like with Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. You’ll also have the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges. Great for marketing people.
Below are some examples specific to Drupal ...
The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. See Google Insights results for Drupal.
In China, Wordpress is winning hands down. See Google Insights results for Drupal.
In my home country, Belgium, Drupal is almost as strong as Wordpress but not nearly as strong as Joomla. See Google Insights results for Drupal.
Regional Drupal interest by country. Google uses the term 'search volume index' for these heatmaps, meaning that they normalized the data by the total traffic from each respective region. In other words, just because two regions show the same percentage for a particular term doesn't mean that their absolute search volumes are the same. See Google Insights results for Drupal.
In the US, the west coast beats the east coast. Based on 'search volume index'. See Google Insights results for Drupal.
Regional Drupal interest by city. Based on 'search volume index'. See Google Insights results for Drupal.
The top search on Drupal -- great for marketing people. Breakout means that the search term has experienced a change in growth greater than 5000%. See Google Insights results for Drupal.
Mollom for Joomla
Right on the heals of the Wordpress plugin for Mollom, Markus Bopp got his Joomla extension for Mollom accepted into the official Joomla Extension Directory. It is great to see Mollom being adopted by more and more platforms. Thanks Markus!
