Dries Buytaert

Drupal Association 2008 wishlist

Since we launched the Drupal Association in January 2007, roughly one year ago, we (i) improved the drupal.org infrastructure, (ii) we helped organize two international Drupal conferences, (iii) we established a relation with an accounting firm, (iv) we funded Drupal's presence at a number of events, (v) we started setting up fundraising campaigns, (vi) we entered into a relation with the Software Freedom Law Center, (vii) we are close to launching a Drupal Association membership model, etc.

In January 2008 we have to elect our second Board of Directors. We are looking for people that want to become either a Permanent Member or a member of the Board of Directors, and that can provide leadership and experience to expand the reach of the Drupal Association and its activities. If you are interested in helping to drive Drupal's explosive growth or if you want to help make a change in this world, you can submit your candidacy by following the instructions on drupal.org.

A few months ago, I asked more than 1,000 Drupal users what they think the Drupal Association should focus on. The results are provided below and might be a good source of inspiration when considering to submit your candidacy.

Drupal.org wishlist

I asked more than 1,000 existing Drupal users (not Drupal prospects) what they would like to see improved on drupal.org. A prioritized wish list is provided below.

We also created a drupal.org redesign group: if you are interested in collaborating on a drupal.org redesign or helping with the drupal.org infrastructure, you know where to start. We have work to do!

Drupal training videos

Hagen Graf, author of a German Drupal book, recently donated 700 EUR to the Drupal Association. This money comes from a German Drupal 5 training video that he made together with Video2brain. For every copy they sold, 1.25 EUR was set aside for the Drupal Association, and over the course of six months, this added up to a 700 EUR donation.

If you do the math, it is easy enough to figure out that they sold 600 copies in 6 months. So not only did they contribute 700 EUR to the Drupal Assocation, they also helped 600 Germans to get started with Drupal. A double hit!

Assuming that the above is correct and given that the DVD sells for 39,95 EUR a copy, it means that this German training video generated roughly 24,000 EUR in revenue. I don't know how much of that is left after they extract all the expenses, discounts and donations, but it does make me wonder about the potential of a Drupal training video recorded in English ...

Drupal community skills

I asked more than 1,000 Drupal users what they are good at and what skills they'd like to invest in. The results are provided below, and might be of interest for upcoming Drupal book authors, the Drupal documentation team, or those of us who want to flatten the Drupal learning curve.

We are good at

1. HTML
2. Administering Drupal
3. CSS
4. PHP
5. System administration

We suck at

1. Flash/Flex
2. Module development
3. Performance, scalability, high-availability
4. Marketing/evangelizing
5. Javascript/JQuery

We want to get better at

1. Module development
2. Theme development
3. Javascript/JQuery
4. PHP
5. Performance, scalability, high-availability

CMS code base comparison

Drupal

Joomla!

Wordpress

Plone

(These graphs depict statistics for the core of each project, and do not include contributed modules, extensions or third-party plugins.)

Conclusions

• All projects have been growing in size. No exceptions.
• Drupal has, by far, the smallest code base. It's lean and mean. Joomla!'s code base is about 8 times bigger than Drupal's. Even Wordpress's code base is larger than Drupal's.
• Of all tools, the Wordpress code has the fewest code comments. Drupal and Joomla!, on the other hand, have the best documented code.

Drupal download statistics

Last year around this time, I shared the download statistics of Drupal core so I figured that an update was in order. It looks like last year, from May 2006 to April 2007, Drupal core was downloaded more than 600,000 times. These numbers do no include betas, release candidates or CVS checkouts. Also, we can't track downloads from mirrors, such as various Linux distributions, nor can we track installations through control panel software for hosting like cPanel or Plesk. Contributed themes or modules are not included in these numbers: we only looked at the main Drupal download.

Drupal 5: performance

With the release of Drupal 5, you might be wondering which version of Drupal is faster -- the latest release in the Drupal 4 series, or the new Drupal 5?

Experimental setup

I setup a Drupal 4.7 site with 2,000 users, 5,000 nodes, 5,000 path aliases, 10,000 comments and 250 vocabulary terms spread over 15 vocabularies.

Next, I configured the main page to show 10 nodes, enabled some blocks in both the left and the right sidebar, setup some primary links, and added a search function at the top of the page. I also setup a contact page using Drupal's contact module. The image below depicts how my final main page was configured.

Furthermore, I made an exact copy of the Drupal 4.7 site and upgraded it to the latest Drupal 5 release. The result is two identical websites; one using Drupal 4.7 and one using Drupal 5.

Benchmarks were conducted on a 3 year old Pentium IV 3Ghz with 2 GB of RAM running Gentoo Linux. I used a single tier web architecture with the following software: Apache 2.0.58, PHP 5.1.6 with APC, and MySQL 5.0.26. No special configuration or tweaking was done other than what was strictly necessary to get things up and running. My setup was CPU-bound, not I/O-bound or memory-bound.

Apache's ab2 with 20 concurrent clients was used to compute how many requests per second the above setup was capable of serving.