most popular Python projects - Plone info from Andy McKay

There are a number of SF projects for Zope/Plone like Archetypes that are
rising in popularity as the Plone user and developer base expands.

ka
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Plone
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From: Andy McKay
Subject: Re: Plone popularity?

Kevin Altis said:
> I'm going to post a message to the marketing-python list soon about
> trying to figure out what the most active and popular Python projects
> are. There are a number of ways to look at that: number of users, number
> of developers, active developers, number of people on the mailing list,
> page views (not just hits) on the web site, downloads of various
> releases per platform, etc. Based on the stats and file downloads on SF,
> Plone certainly seems quite popular, though the hits are off
> dramatically since the peak from January-May of last year; any idea for
> the drop and/or surge last year? I was surprised to see how many
> downloads there were for the MacOSX package. It also seems a bit
> surprising that there would be so many downloads on Windows, I wonder if
> people tend to run Plone on Windows servers instead of Linux? Certainly,
> Python downloads for Windows is roughly 80% of Python downloads from
> python.org.

Yeah i don't think its so much that so many Plone sites run on Windows,
rather that people try it out on Windows. We are now starting to track
uninstalls as well and we've got a lot of "yes it works on windows, now
moving to my linux server".

We have a huge and growing Mac following. Approx. 1/3 of people at the
Plone Conf. were Mac users, very high. Also we had quite a few women as
well, which is neat.

> Anyway, if you have any stats fodder that you think is relevant it would
> be helpful. I realize that in the case of Plone, we are also crossing
> into the realm of users versus developers since many people that
> download and install Plone may never do any Python, or at least that is
> a possibility.

http://stats.plone.org tells how popular Plone is, we think we are
bigger that Zope now. (http://radio.weblogs.com/0116506/)

Developers: 86+ and all the ones in plone-i18n as well (61) and
archetypes (arguably a spin off project, 42) plus the collective
(another spin off a collection of generic and Plone products, 100+)

Downloads: we are figuring ~1k a day, although getting a reliable figure
from sf is hard. We calculated the other day we've broken 100,000
downloads.
(http://plone.org/newsitems/100k-downloads/view?searchterm=downloads)

There is a book on its way too
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1590593294)

</end of marketing>

> BTW, are you soliciting money donations for Plone? Would you consider
> soliciting donations with some or all of the proceeds going to the
> Python Software Foundation? Something like this...
>
> http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/donations.html

Well I do ;)

We are actually slowing trying to get our own independent organisation
loosely called Plone Foundation that will have its own money
solicitation process that may include the PSF.
--
   Andy McKay
   ClearWind Consulting
   http://www.clearwind.ca