Objective: To be able to answer the question(s): "How big is the Plone community? How many times has Plone been downloaded? How many contributors does Plone have?" Tracking trends and statistics of Plone in search engines, blogosphere and Amazon sales is important to gauge the pulse of the software.

Team leader: Karl Horak (aka Schlepp) has done some initial work in this area which can be found on his blog at http://plonemetrics.blogspot.com

Team participants: Add your name and IRC nick here

Studies

Estimate of Plone use in England

Proposed measures of effectiveness (http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=py-ZRibpWMZUYA8zTyMUlag&hl=en -- see Bullock's dissertation for the formal methodology).  

Chronological listing of Plone events (kindly add attendance figures if you have that information)

Compared to other CMS projects

See metrics/indicators for the Drupal project.  A similar study has been done for Plone.

Drupal on Google Insights

CMS Code Comparison between Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla and Plone

Plone in Social Media

A list of various resources and channels in the Web 2.0 world. 

N.B.:  Some searches confound Plone, the CMS, with Plone, the band. 

Ohloh

From Wikipedia Ohloh entry: By retrieving data from revision control repositories (such as CVS, SVN, or Git), Ohloh provides statistics about the longevity of projects, their licenses (including license conflict information) and software metrics such as source lines of code and commit statistics.

Plone's statistics on Ohloh:http://www.ohloh.net/projects/plone

(What does this cover exactly? e.g. CMF is not counted in here, but separate, so might Zope, and the dozens of eggs that now make up Plone? - Matt)

This from Hanno Schlichting on the matter:  Some people like numbers and statistics and ohloh.net has been providing some of those for a while. What most people don't seem to know, is that the way ohloh calculates code statistics from Subversion and CVS code repositories only works in the most simplest cases. ohloh only shows correct numbers if every enlisting of a project uses a simple trunk only development line, without any copies or moves of the trunk. This is not the case for Plone and thus ohloh was showing highly inaccurate numbers for Plone. I was hoping to see some progress on this topic from ohloh, but no progress has been made on this over the last months. To avoid people from mistaking those numbers for more than just fun, I removed the CVS and Subversion enlistings for Plone and classified Plone as "Ohloh doesn't support this project's source control system

 

Great Backyard Plone Count

What is the GBPC?

The Great Backyard Plone Count is a shameless copy of the Great Backyard Bird Count.  Just as GBBC is an effort by the Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to track birds, GBPC is a fledgling effort to catalog Plone sites worldwide.   Its a voluntary, self-reporting project (with all the weaknesses that go along with it) that attempts to find as many Plone sites as possible, including intranet sites behind firewalls. 

The Great Backyard Plone Count is a hoped-to-be annual four-day event that engages Plone watchers of all ages in counting Plone sites to create a real-time snapshot of where the sites are across the world. This year the GBPC is February 13-16, 2009, the same dates as the GBBC.  Anyone can participate, from beginning Plonistas to experts. It takes as little as 15 minutes on one day, or you can count for as long as you like each day of the event. It’s free, fun, and easy—and it helps Plone. We'll be adding updated 2009 GBPC materials as they become available.

• See the new 2009 GBPC PowerPoint presentation  (Pending)
  
• Print a regional tally sheet  (Pending)
  
• Download the 2009 GBPC poster (Draft)
  

Participants count Plone sites anywhere for as little or as long as they wish during the four-day period. They tally the site name, URL, and other statistics. To report their counts, they fill out an online checklist at the Great Backyard Plone Count web site.

As the count progresses, anyone with Internet access can explore what is being reported from their own towns or anywhere in the World. Next year they will also see how one year's numbers compare with those from previous years.

Statistians and Plone enthusiasts can learn a lot by knowing where the sites are. Websites are dynamic; they are constantly in flux. No single observer or team of observers could hope to document the complex distribution and changes of so many sites in such a short time.

We need your help. Make sure the sites you visit from your online community are well represented in the count. It doesn't matter whether you report the 5 sites you routinely visit or the 75 websites you see during a day's browsing and searching specifically for Plone portals.

Your counts can help us answer many questions:

•     How does the number and types of Plone sites compare with past years?  (Well, at least next year we can do this!)
  
•     How are other applications, especially CMSs, affecting Plone sites in different application domains as well as geographical regions?
•     What kinds of differences in Plone diversity are apparent in various domains and usage areas?
•     Are any types of Plone sites undergoing worrisome declines that point to the need for attention?

Plone developers will use the counts, along with observations from other citizen-web projects, such as Plone.net, CMS Matrix, and Ohloh, to give us an immense picture of our Plone environment. Each year that these data are collected makes them more meaningful and allows Plone and Web researchers to investigate far-reaching questions.

Disclaimer:  All information collected in the Google Docs spreadsheet will be publicly available.  Identifying information is voluntary and all fields are optional.